| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Life of a Fossil Hunter
Author: Sternberg, Charles H.
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Life of a Fossil Hunter" ***
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
[Illustration:
CHARLES H. STERNBERG.
]
American Nature Series
Group IV. Working with Nature
THE LIFE
OF A
FOSSIL HUNTER
BY
CHARLES H. STERNBERG
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1909
Copyright, 1909,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published, February, 1909_
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
I wish to call the attention of the reader of my story “The Life of a
Fossil Hunter” to the fact that I am under obligations especially to
Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn, President and Curator of Paleontology of
the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He has supplied me
with many of the most beautiful of the illustrations that illumine these
pages and has assisted the work in many ways.
I would also express my gratitude to Miss Margaret Wagenalls of New
York, who edited the manuscript; to Prof. Dunlap of the Kansas State
University, for his kindly criticisms; and to Dr. W. K. Gregory,
Lecturer on Zoology at Columbia University, whose untiring efforts have
brought the book to its present form.
I hope it may awaken a wide interest in the study of ancient life, and I
thank my friends everywhere who are contributing to that end.
CHARLES H. STERNBERG.
LAWRENCE, KANSAS,
_January, 1909_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY PROFESSOR HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN xi
I. EARLY DAYS AND WORK IN THE DAKOTA GROUP OF THE CRETACEOUS 1
II. FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE KANSAS CHALK (1876) 32
III. EXPEDITION WITH PROFESSOR COPE TO THE BAD LANDS OF THE
UPPER CRETACEOUS (1876) 61
IV. FURTHER WORK IN THE KANSAS CHALK (1877) 99
V. DISCOVERY OF THE LOUP FORK BEDS OF KANSAS AND SUBSEQUENT
WORK THERE (1877, 1882–1884) 120
VI. EXPEDITION TO THE OREGON DESERT IN 1877 144
VII. EXPEDITION TO THE JOHN DAY RIVER IN 1878 170
VIII. FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE PERMIAN OF TEXAS IN 1882 205
IX. EXPEDITIONS IN THE PERMIAN OF TEXAS FOR PROFESSOR COPE
(1895–1897) 230
X. IN THE RED BEDS OF TEXAS FOR THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF MUNICH
(1901) 244
XI. CONCLUSION 265
INDEX 283
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CHARLES H. STERNBERG Frontispiece
ROCKS OF LARAMIE BEDS ON SOUTH SCHNEIDER CREEK, CONVERSE
CO., WYOMING 16
WEATHERED ROCKS AND LARAMIE BEDS NEAR SOUTH SCHNEIDER
CREEK 16
MUSHROOM-LIKE CONCRETION KNOWN AS PULPIT ROCK 17
FOSSIL LEAVES OF _Sassafras dissectum_. (After
Lesquereux.) 20
FOSSIL LEAVES. _a_, UNOPENED LEAF NODULE. _b_, NODULE
OPENED TO SHOW FOSSIL LEAF. _c, d, e, f_, VARIOUS FORMS
OF FOSSIL LEAVES 21
FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM DR. LESQUEREUX TO THE AUTHOR 24
SKULL AND FRONT LIMB OF _Clidastes tortor_ 44
SKELETON OF _Clidastes tortor_ 45
SKELETON OF RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_ 45
RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_. Restoration by
Osborn and Knight 50
SKULL OF THE FLAT-WRISTED MOSASAUR, _Platecarpus
coryphæus_ 51
RESTORATION OF KANSAS CRETACEOUS ANIMALS. (From drawing by
S. Prentice, after Williston.) _a_, _Unitacrinus
socialis_; _b_, _Clidastes velox_; _c_, _Ornithostoma
ingens_ 56
GIANT CRETACEOUS FISH, _Portheus molossus_ (above),
COMPARED WITH A SIX-FOOT MODERN TARPON (below) 57
LOWER JAW OF _Trachodon marginatus_, SHOWING SUCCESSIVE
LAYERS OF TEETH. TOP AND SIDE VIEWS OF A TOOTH OF
_Myledaphus bipartitus_. (After Osborn and Lambe.) 76
SKULL OF A DUCK-BILLED DINOSAUR, _Diclonius_, FOUR FEET IN
LENGTH 77
PROFESSOR E. D. COPE 78
BRONTOSAURUS OR THUNDER LIZARD. Restoration by Osborn and
Knight 79
FOSSIL SHELLS, _Haploscapha grandis_. (After Cope.) 108
CHARLES STERNBERG AND SON TAKING UP A LARGE SLAB OF
FOSSILS FROM A CHALK BED IN GOVE CO., KANSAS 109
CAMP AND WAGON OF THE FOSSIL HUNTERS ON GRASSWOOD CREEK,
CONVERSE CO., WYOMING 109
SKELETON OF THE PLESIOSAUR, _Dolichorhynchus osborni_.
(After Williston.) 114
FOSSIL LIMB BONES OF THE GIANT SEA TORTOISE, _Protostega
gigas_ 115
FOSSIL SHELL OF GIANT LAND TURTLE, _Testudo orthopygia_ 122
THE SNAKE-NECKED ELASMOSAURUS, _Elasmosaurus platyurus_.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight 123
THREE-TOED HORSE, _Hypohippus_. (After Gidley.) 132
FOSSIL RHINOCEROS, _Teleoceras fossiger_. (After Osborn.) 133
SKULL AND TUSKS OF IMPERIAL MAMMOTH, _Elephas imperator_ 178
FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) UPPER JOHN DAY
EXPOSURE 179
FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) MIDDLE JOHN DAY
EXPOSURE 179
FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) MASCALL FORMATION 202
FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) CLARNO FORMATION 202
SKULL OF GREAT SABER-TOOTHED TIGER, _Pogonodon
platycopis_. (After Cope.) 203
SKELETON OF FIN-BACKED LIZARD, _Naosaurus claviger_ 234
FIN-BACKED LIZARD, _Naosaurus claviger_. Restoration by
Osborn and Knight 235
FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM PROF. E. D. COPE TO THE AUTHOR 238
FOSSIL SKULL OF GIANT SALAMANDER, _Diplocaulus
magnicornis_. (After Broili.) 240
PROFESSOR HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 241
FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM DR. KARL VON ZITTEL TO THE AUTHOR 246
DR. KARL VON ZITTEL 256
SHELL OF _Toxochelys bauri?_ 257
NIOBRARA GROUP, CRETACEOUS CHALK WITH CAP ROCK OF LOUP
FORK TERTIARY, KNOWN AS CASTLE ROCK, GOVE CO., KANSAS 262
CHALK OF KANSAS, KNOWN AS THE COFFEE MILL. Hell Creek 262
BONES OF _Platecarpus coryphæus_ 263
SKELETON OF _Hesperornis regalis_, THE GIANT-TOOTHED BIRD
OF THE KANSAS CRETACEOUS 266
SLAB OF FOSSIL CRINOIDS, _Uintacrinus socialis_,
CONTAINING 160 CALYCES, COVERING FOUR BY SEVEN FEET 267
SKULL AND HORNS OF GIANT BISON FROM HOXIE, KANSAS. SPREAD
OF HORN CORES SIX FEET, ONE INCH; LENGTH ALONG CURVE,
EIGHT FEET 268
JAW OF COLUMBIAN MAMMOTH, _Elephas columbi_ 269
THREE-HORNED DINOSAUR, _Triceratops sp._ Restoration by
Osborn and Knight 270
DUCK-BILLED DINOSAUR, _Trachodon mirabilis_. Restoration
by Osborn and Knight 271
INTRODUCTION
_By_ HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN,
_President and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology of the American Museum
of Natural History, New York_
Our bookshelves contain the lives or narratives of adventure of many
hunters of living game, but the life of a fossil hunter has never been
written before. Both are in the closest touch with nature and,
therefore, full of interest. The one is as full of adventure, excitement
and depression, hope and failure, as the other, yet there is ever the
great difference that the hunter of live game, thorough sportsman though
he may be, is always bringing live animals nearer to death and
extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct
animals back to life. This revivification of the past, of the forms
which once graced the forests and plains, and rivers and seas, is
attended with as great fascination as the quest of live game, and to my
mind is a still more honorable and noble pursuit.
The richness of the great American fossil fields, which extend over the
vast arid and semi-arid area of the West, scattered over both the great
plains region and the great mountain region, has resulted in the
creation of a distinctively American profession: that of fossil hunting.
The fossil hunter must first of all be a scientific enthusiast. He must
be willing to endure all kinds of hardships, to suffer cold in the early
spring and the late autumn and early winter months, to suffer intense
heat and the glare of the sun in summer months, and he must be prepared
to drink alkali water, and in some regions to fight off the attack of
the mosquito and other pests. He must be something of an engineer in
order to be able to handle large masses of stone and transport them over
roadless wastes of desert to the nearest shipping point; he must have a
delicate and skilful touch to preserve the least fragments of bone when
fractured; he must be content with very plain living, because the
profession is seldom, if ever, remunerative, and he is almost invariably
underpaid; he must find his chief reward and stimulus in the sense of
discovery and in the despatching of specimens to museums which he has
never seen for the benefit of a public which has little knowledge or
appreciation of the self-sacrifices which the fossil hunter has made.
The fossil fields of America have fortunately attracted a number of such
devoted explorers, and one of the pioneers on the honorable list is the
author of this work, who by his untiring energy has contributed some of
the finest specimens which now adorn the shelves and cases of many of
the great museums of America and Europe.
Although special explorations have been described, sometimes in
considerable detail, this is the first time that the “life of a fossil
hunter” has been written, and it is fitting that it comes from the pen
of the oldest living representative of this distinctively American
profession. The name of Charles H. Sternberg is attached to discoveries
in many parts of the West; discoveries which have formed distinct
contributions to science, to the advance of paleontology, to our
knowledge of the wonderful ancient life of North America. His is a
career full of adventure, of self-sacrifice, worthy of lasting record
and recognition by all lovers of nature.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LIFE OF A FOSSIL HUNTER
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS AND WORK IN THE DAKOTA GROUP OF THE CRETACEOUS
I do not remember when I first began collecting fossils, but I have
always loved nature.
Fifteen years of my early life were spent in Otsego County, New York, at
dear old Hartwick Seminary, where my father, the Rev. Dr. Levi
Sternberg, was principal for fourteen years, and my grandfather, Dr.
George B. Miller, a much-loved, devout man, professor of theology for
thirty-five. The lovely valley of the Susquehanna, in which it stands,
lies five miles below Cooperstown, the birthplace of the Walter Scott of
America, James Fenimore Cooper, and my boyhood was spent among scenes
which he has made famous. Often my companions and I have gone picnicking
on Otsego Lake, shouting to call up the echo, and spreading our
tablecloth on shore beneath the very tree from which the catamount was
once about to spring upon terrified Elizabeth Temple.
My greatest pleasure in those early days and best, was to live with a
darling cousin in the woods. There among the majestic trees,—maples,
hickories, pines, and hemlocks,—we used to build sylvan retreats,
weaving willow twigs in and out among the poles which I cut for
supports; and there, to those great trees, I delivered my boy orations.
We delighted also to visit and explore Moss Pond, a body of water on top
of the hills across the river, surrounded entirely by sponge moss. We
could “teeter” across the moss to a log that gave us support, and catch
blind bullheads, or eat our lunch in the cool, dense hemlock woods that
surrounded the water, where the heavy branches, intertwined like mighty
arms, shut away the light, so that even at midday the sun could barely
pierce their shadows.
How I loved flowers! I carried to my mother the first crocus bloom that
showed its head above the melting snow, the trailing arbutus, and the
tender foliage of the wintergreen. Later in the season I gathered for
her the yellow cowslip and fragrant water-lily; and when autumn frosts
had tinged the leaves with crimson and gold I filled her arms with a
glorious wealth of color.
Even in those early days I used to cut out shells from the limestone
strata of the region with whatever tools were at hand, but they were
admired chiefly as examples of the wonderful power of running water to
carve rocks into the semblance of shells. Or if one of the more
observant remarked that these shells looked very much as if they had
been alive once, the only theory that would account for their presence
and yet sustain the belief that the world was only six thousand years
old, was that the Almighty, who created the rocks, could easily, at the
same time, have created the ancient plants and animals as fossils, just
as they were found.
I remember a rich find I made in the garret of an uncle in Ames, New
York,—a cradle filled with fossil shells and crystals of quartz. They
had been collected by my uncle’s brother, who, fortunately, as my uncle
said, had died early, before bringing disgrace upon the family by
wasting his time wandering over the hills and gathering stones. All the
large specimens he had collected had been thrown away, and the smaller
ones in the old cradle had long been forgotten. I was welcome to all my
uncle’s buggy could carry when he took me home, and I can never forget
the joy of going over that material again and again, selecting the
specimens that appealed most to my sense of the beautiful and the
wonderful. I labeled them all “From Uncle James,” and it greatly
astonished a dear aunt of mine, to whom I gave them some years later
when we moved West, to find in the collection a lot of baculites,
labeled “Worms from Uncle James.”
When I was ten years old, I met with an accident from which I have never
completely recovered. I remember the wild chase I was making after an
older boy, over the hay-mows and piles of shocked grain in my father’s
barn. On the floor below, an old-fashioned thresher, one of the first of
its kind, was making an ear-splitting noise, while outside the two
horses, hitched to an inclined plane, climbed incessantly, but never
reached the top.
The boy climbed a shock of oats on the scaffold in the peak of the barn,
and “Charley-boy,” as my mother called me, following him, slipped
through a hole in the top of the ladder which had been covered by the
settling oats, and fell twenty feet to the floor below. The older boy
climbed swiftly down and carried me home insensible to my mother.
Our family physician thought that only a sprain was the result, and
bandaged the injured limb; but, as a matter of fact, the fibula of the
left leg had been dislocated, so that there was much suffering and a
little crippled boy going about among the hills on crutches.
The leg never grew quite strong again, and some years later gave me a
good deal of trouble. In 1872 I was in charge of a ranch in Kansas, and
during November of that year a great sleet storm covered the whole
central part of the state. In order to water my cattle, which were
scattered over a range of several thousand acres on Elm Creek, I was
obliged to follow around small bands of them to their accustomed
watering-places and cut the ice for them. The water that splashed over
my clothing froze solid, and the result was that inflammatory rheumatism
settled in the lame leg. I sat in a leathern chair all winter close to a
boxwood stove, tended by my dear mother, who never left me day or night.
When the inflammation subsided, the knee joint had become ankylosed, and
in order to avoid going on crutches all my life, I lay in the hospital
at Fort Riley for three months, all alone in a great ward, and had the
limb straightened by a special machine. So skilfully did the army
surgeon do this work that I threw away crutches and cane, and, although
the leg has always been stiff, I have since walked thousands of miles
among the fossiliferous beds in the desolate fields of the West.
In 1865, when I was fifteen years old, my father accepted the
principalship of the Iowa Lutheran College at Albion, Marshall County,
and the broken hill country of my boyhood days was replaced by the
plains and water courses of the Middle West.
Two years later my twin brother and I emigrated to an older brother’s
ranch in Ellsworth County, Kansas, two and a half miles south of Fort
Harker, now known as Kanopolis. This post was at that time the terminus
of the Kansas Division of the Union Pacific, and almost daily train-load
after train-load of prairie schooners, drawn by oxen, burros, or mules,
pulled out from it over the old Butterfield and Santa Fé trails, the one
leading up the Smoky Hill, the other through the valley of the Arkansas
to Denver and the Southwest.
In spring great herds of buffalo followed the tender grass northward,
returning to the South in the fall; and one bright day my brother and I
started out on our first buffalo hunt. Driving a team of Indian ponies
hitched to a light spring wagon, we soon left the few settlements
behind, and reached the level prairie to the southwest, near old Fort
Zaro, a deserted one-company post on the Santa Fé Trail. At this time it
had been appropriated by a cattleman who had a small herd grazing in the
vicinity.
When within a few miles of this post, we saw a large herd of buffalo
lying down a mile away. It was no easy matter to crawl toward them over
the plain, pushing myself along without raising my body above the short
grass, but after strenuous efforts I got within shooting distance
without disturbing them, and was resting for a shot, when the rancher
rode through the herd and sent them all off at a lope. Much angered and
almost tempted to turn my gun on the man, I returned to the wagon, and
we drove on across country that had been cropped as if by a great herd
of sheep by the thousands of buffalo that had passed that way on their
journey south.
Anxious to find picketing-ground and water, we reached the Arkansas
River, where in a swale covered with grass and willows were paths cut by
the buffalo. I lay down in one of these, and bringing my gun to my
shoulder, was just drawing bead, when a large animal rushed across my
line of vision at right angles to the trail. I pulled the trigger, and
down went the brown mass in a heap on the ground.
Swinging my gun above my head, I rushed forward shouting, “I’ve killed a
buffalo!”—to find that I had shot a Texas cow. Terrified at the thought
of its owner’s anger, we rushed back to the wagon, and, whipping up the
ponies, sped away as if the furies were after us. But cooler second
thoughts led us to the conclusion that the cow had come north with the
buffalo, and was as much our prey as the buffalo themselves.
Just before sunset we reached a part of the country through which the
buffalo had not passed, where a rich carpet of grass, covering all the
plain, offered plenty of food for our tired ponies. Here we were
delighted to find, standing in a ravine, an old bull buffalo, which had
been driven out of the herd to die. Concealing ourselves behind the
carcass of a cow, we opened fire upon him from our Spencer carbines, and
continued to riddle his poor old body with leaden slugs until his
struggles ceased. Even then, when he had lain down to rise no more, we
crawled up behind him and threw stones at him, to make sure that he was
dead. We found his flesh too tough for food; but it was an exciting
event to us two boys to kill this massive beast, in earlier days perhaps
the leader of the herd.
In this connection I might tell of a chase I had several years later,
while living on a ranch in eastern Ellsworth County. I saw a huge
buffalo bull come loping along from the hills, headed for a section of
land that was inclosed by a wire fence. On the other side of this
section there was a piece of timber-land, and fearing that if he got
into the dense timber I should lose him, I rode after him at the top of
my speed.
When his lowered head struck the wire fence it flew up like a spring
gate and immediately closed down behind him. In order to follow, I had
either to cut the wire or go out of my way to a gate half a mile to the
south. I decided on the latter course, and applied quirt and spur to my
horse, but upon reaching the gate, discovered my escaping quarry already
halfway across the section. I got just near enough to put a bullet into
his rump as he passed through the fence on the other side, and
disappeared in the dense woods beyond.
In my excitement I shouted to my pony, and, dismounting and standing on
the wire to hold it down, yelled at him to come across. But a sudden fit
of obstinacy had seized him, and he would not come. I had to let the
fence up while I thrashed him, and then as soon as I got it under my
feet again, he pulled back as before. We repeated this performance until
I was exhausted and gave up the struggle.
But upon casting a look of despair in the direction of the vanished
buffalo, I was both astonished and ashamed to see him standing under an
elm tree not ten feet away, covered up all except his eyes by a great
wild grapevine, and gazing in mute astonishment at the struggle between
Nimrod and his pony. I have always regretted that I took advantage of
the confidence he placed in me, for as soon as I could control my
jumping nerves, I shot the noble beast behind the shoulder, and he fell.
I saw my last herd of buffalo in Scott County, Kansas, in 1877.
Antelope, however, continued to be abundant as late as 1884, and only
two years ago I saw a couple of them among some cattle near Monument
Rocks, in Gove County.
In camp, during those early days, we were rarely out of antelope meat,
and even now my mouth waters at the thought of the delicious tenderloin,
soaked first in salt water to season it and remove the blood, then
covered with cracker dust, and fried in a skillet of boiling lard. In
those days a hind quarter could be hung up under the wagon in the
hottest part of summer, and not spoil. The wind hermetically sealed it,
and there were no blow-flies then. The early settlers of a new country
bring with them, and protect, their enemies, and destroy their friends,
the skunks, badgers, wildcats, and coyotes, as well as hawks, eagles,
and snakes, because they kill a chicken or two as a change from their
usual diet of prairie dogs and rabbits.
In those pioneer days the Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and other Indian
tribes made constant inroads upon the venturesome settler who, following
the advice of Horace Greeley, had come West to grow up with the country.
I remember when old Santante, a chief of the Kiowas, came to the post in
a government ambulance, which he had captured on one of his raids. In
time of peace, the Indians belong to the Interior Department of the
government, so that all the officer in command at the fort could do was
to extend the old chief the courtesy of the army and care of himself and
team. Once, at the old stone sutler’s store, I heard him remark, after
he had filled himself well with whisky, “All the property on the Smoky
Hill is mine. I want it, and then I want hair.”
He got both the following year.
In July, 1867, owing to the fear of an Indian outrage, General A. J.
Smith gave us at the ranch a guard of ten colored soldiers under a
colored sergeant, and all the settlers gathered in the stockade, a
structure about twenty feet long and fourteen wide, built by setting a
row of cottonwood logs in a trench and roofing them over with split
logs, brush, and earth. During the height of the excitement, the women
and children slept on one side of the building in a long bed on the
floor, and the men on the other side.
The night of the third of July was so sultry that I concluded to sleep
outside on a hay-covered shed. At the first streak of dawn I was
awakened by the report of a Winchester, and, springing up, heard the
sergeant call to his men, who were scattered in rifle pits around the
building, to fall in line.
As soon as he had them lined up, he ordered them to fire across the
river in the direction of some cottonwoods, to which a band of Indians
had retreated. The whites came forward with guns in their hands and
offered to join in the fight, but the sergeant commanded: “Let the
citizens keep in the rear.” This, indeed, they were very willing to do
when the order was given, “Fire at will!” and the soldiers began sending
leaden balls whizzing through the air in every conceivable arc, but
never in a straight line, toward the enemy, who were supposed to be
lying on the ground.
As soon as it was light my brother and I explored the river and found a
place where seven braves, in their moccasined feet, had run across a wet
sandbar in the direction of the cottonwoods, as the sergeant had said.
Their pony trails could be easily seen in the high, wet grass.
The party in the stockade were not reassured to hear the tramp of a
large body of horsemen, especially as the soldiers had fired away all
their ammunition; but the welcome clank of sabers and jingle of spurs
laid their fears to rest, and soon a couple of troops of cavalry, with
an officer in command, rode up through the gloom.
After the sergeant had been severely reprimanded for wasting his
ammunition, the scout Wild Bill was ordered to explore the country for
Indian signs. But, although the tracks could not have been plainer, his
report was so reassuring that the whole command returned to the Fort.
Some hours later I spied this famous scout at the sutler’s store, his
chair tilted back against the stone wall, his two ivory-mounted
revolvers dangling at his belt, the target of all eyes among the
garrison loafers. As I came up this gallant called out, “Well,
Sternberg, your boys were pretty well frightened this morning by some
buffalo that came down to water.”
“Buffalo!” I said; “that trail was made by our old cows two weeks ago.”
Later the general in command told me that they had prepared for a big
hop at the Fort on the night of the fourth, and that Bill did not report
the Indian tracks because he did not want to be sent off on a long scout
just then.
In the unsettled state of the country at this time there were other
dangers to be guarded against beside that of Indians, as I learned to my
cost.
As a boy of seventeen, it was my duty on the ranch to haul milk, butter,
eggs, and vegetables to Fort Harker for sale. I cared for my pony
myself, and in order to get the milk and other food to the Fort in time
for the soldiers’ five-o’clock breakfast, I had to go without my own.
One day I had a number of bills to collect from the officers, but as I
was unusually tired, and the officers were not out of bed when I called,
I put the bills in my inside pocket and started home.
As was my custom, after leaving the garrison I lay down on the
wagon-seat and went to sleep, letting my faithful horse carry me home of
his own accord. I have no recollection of what happened afterwards, but
when I reached the ranch my brothers found me sitting up in the wagon
moaning and swinging my arms, with the blood flowing from a slung-shot
wound in my forehead. I had been struck down in my sleep and robbed of
all the money I had on my person, as it happened only about five
dollars.
Providentially our nearest neighbor, D. B. Long, was a retired hospital
steward, and the post surgeon, Dr. B. F. Fryer, who was sent for
immediately, was just ready to drive to town with his team of fleet
little black ponies. He reached the ranch in an incredibly short time,
and, although respiration had ceased, those two faithful men kept up
artificial respiration for hours. My oldest brother, Dr. Sternberg, for
years Surgeon-General of the Army, was also sent for, and I found him
lying on a mattress by my side when I regained consciousness two weeks
later.
I might tell also of the ruffians who at one time held Ellsworth City in
a grip of iron, and how, until they killed each other off or moved
further west with the railroad, the dead-cart used to pass down the
street every morning to pick up the bodies of those who had been killed
in the saloons the night before, and thrown out on the pavement to be
hauled away.
But, although I should like to recall more of the incidents connected
with the opening up of a new country, time presses, and I must pass on
to an account of my work as a fossil hunter.
I had not been long in this part of the country before I found that the
neighboring hills, topped with red sandstone, contained, in isolated
places, from a few feet to a mile in diameter and scattered through a
wide expanse of country, the impressions of leaves like those of our
existing forests.
The rocks consisted of red, white, and brown sandstone, with interlaid
beds of variously-colored clays; while here and there, scattered through
the formation, were vast concretions of very hard flint-like sandstone,
often standing on softer rocks that had been weathered away into
columns, the whole giving the effect of giant mushrooms, as seen in the
cuts (Figs. 1–3).
This formation, resting unconformably on the upper carboniferous rocks,
belongs to the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous Period. The sedimentary
rocks were laid down during the Cretaceous Period, the closing period of
the “Age of Reptiles,” in a great ocean, whose shore line enters Kansas
at the mouth of Cow Creek on the Arkansas River, and extending in a
northwesterly direction in the vicinity of Beatrice, Nebraska, touches
Iowa, and passes on to Greenland.
I was carried away at this time by the thoughts that had been surging
through the hearts of men since Darwin bade them turn to nature for the
answers to their problems concerning the plants and animals of this
earth.
How often in imagination I have rolled back the years and pictured
central Kansas, now raised two thousand feet above sea level, as a group
of islands scattered about in a semi-tropical sea! There are no frosts
and few insect pests to mar the foliage of the great forests that grow
along its shores, and the ripe leaves fall gently into the sand, to be
covered up by the incoming tide and to form impressions and counterparts
of themselves as perfect as if a Divine hand had stamped them in
yielding wax.
Go back with me, dear reader, and see the treeless plains of to-day
covered with forests. Here rises the stately column of a redwood; there
a magnolia opens its fragrant blossoms; and yonder stands a fig tree.
There is no human hand to gather its luscious fruit, but we can imagine
that the Creator walked among the trees in the cool of the evening,
inhaling the incense wafted to Him as a thank-offering for their being.
All His works magnify Him. The cinnamon sends forth its perfume beside
the sassafras; linden and birch, sweet gum and persimmon, wild cherry
and poplar mingle with each other. The five-lobed sarsaparilla vine
encircles the tree-trunks, and in the shade grows a pretty fern. Many
other beautiful plant forms grace the landscape, but the glorious
picture is only for him who gathers the remains of these forests, and by
the power of his imagination puts life into them; for it is some five
million years, according to the great Dana of my childhood days, since
the trees of this Kansas forest lifted their mighty trunks to the sun.
[Illustration:
FIG. 1.—ROCKS OF LARAMIE BEDS ON SOUTH SCHNEIDER CREEK, CONVERSE
COUNTY, WYOMING.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 2.—WEATHERED ROCKS AND LARAMIE BEDS NEAR SOUTH SCHNEIDER CREEK.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 3.—MUSHROOM-LIKE CONCRETION KNOWN AS PULPIT ROCK.
Elm Creek, Kansas, near Sternberg’s ranch. (From Trans. Kan. Acad.
Sci.)
]
At the age of seventeen, therefore, I made up my mind what part I should
play in life, and determined that whatever it might cost me in
privation, danger, and solitude, I would make it my business to collect
facts from the crust of the earth; that thus men might learn more of
“the introduction and succession of life on our earth.”
My father was unable to see the practical side of the work. He told me
that if I had been a rich man’s son, it would doubtless be an enjoyable
way of passing my time, but as I should have to earn a living, I ought
to turn to some other business. I say here, however, lest I forget it,
that, although my struggle for a livelihood has been hard, often,
indeed, bitter, I have always been financially better off as a collector
than when I have wasted, speaking from the point of view of science,
some of the most precious days of my life attempting to make money by
farming or in some other business, so that I might live at home and
avoid the hardships and exposures of camp life.
With collecting-bag over my shoulder and pick in hand, I wandered over
the hills of Ellsworth County. If I chanced upon a locality rich in
fossil leaves, thrilled with a joy that knows no comparison, I walked on
air as I carried my trophies home; while if night overtook me with an
empty bag, I could scarcely drag my weary limbs along.
Among the rich localities that I discovered was one which I called
“Sassafras Hollow,” because of the countless sassafras leaves I quarried
there. It is situated about a mile southeast of the schoolhouse on
Thompson Creek, in the Hudson brothers’ neighborhood, and lies at the
head of a narrow ravine in a ledge of sandstone, with a spring beneath.
Here too, the noted paleobotanist, Dr. Leo Lesquereux, collected fossils
in 1872, securing among other specimens a large, beautiful leaf which he
named in my honor “_Protophyllum sternbergii_.”
I have a vivid recollection of the discovery of another locality. One
night I dreamed that I was on the river, where the Smoky Hill cuts into
its northern bank, three miles southeast of Fort Harker. A perpendicular
face in the colored clay impinges on the stream, and just below this
cliff is the mouth of a shallow ravine that heads in the prairie half a
mile above.
In my dream, I walked up this ravine and was at once attracted by a
large cone-shaped hill, separated from a knoll to the south by a lateral
ravine. On either slope were many chunks of rock, which the frost had
loosened from the ledges above. The spaces left vacant in these rocks by
the decayed leaves had accumulated moisture, and this moisture, when it
froze, had had enough expansive power to split the rock apart and
display the impressions of the leaves.
Other masses of rock had broken in such a way that the spaces once
filled by the midribs and stems of the leaves admitted grass roots; and
their rootlets, seeking the tiny channels left by the ribs and veins of
the leaves, had, with the power of growing plants, opened the doors of
these prisoners, shut up in the heart of the rock for millions of years.
I went to the place and found everything just as it had been in my
dream.
Two of the largest leaves known to the Dakota Group were taken from this
place. One, a great three-lobed leaf, the stem passing through an
ear-like projection at its base, Dr. Lesquereux called _Aspidophyllum
trilobatum_; the other, equally large,—over a foot in diameter,—and
three-lobed too, but indented with large teeth, he called _Sassafras
dissectum_ (Fig. 4).
I believe I am the only fossil hunter who has collected from this
locality. Probably my eyes saw the specimens while I was chasing an
antelope or stray cow and too much occupied with the work in hand to
take note of them consciously, until they were revealed to me by the
dream, the only one in my experience that ever came true. I tell this
story to show how deeply I was interested in these fossils.
My first collection, or rather the cream of it, was sent to Professor
Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution. The following is the
letter which I received from him:
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION,
Washington, June 8, 1870.
Dear Sir:—We are duly in receipt of your letter of May 28th,
announcing the transmission of the fossil plants collected by your
brother and yourself, and shall look forward with much interest to
their arrival. As soon as possible after they reach us, we shall
submit them to competent scientific investigation, and report to you
the result.
Very respectfully yours, etc.,
SPENCER F. BAIRD,
Assistant Secretary in Charge.
There was no money in fossils at that early day, but I prized more
highly than money the promise in the letter that my specimens would be
studied by competent authority, and that I should receive credit for my
discoveries.
[Illustration:
FIG. 4.—FOSSIL LEAVES OF _Sassafras dissectum_.
(After Lesquereux.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 5.—_a_, UNOPENED LEAF NODULE; _b_, NODULE OPENED TO SHOW FOSSIL
LEAF; _c, d, e, f_, VARIOUS FORMS OF FOSSIL LEAVES.
]
The specimens were sent to Dr. John Strong Newberry, professor in
Columbia University and State Geologist of Ohio. He did not find
opportunity at that time to publish the results, but long years
afterwards, in 1898, I received from Dr. Arthur Hollick a copy of “Later
Flora of North America,” a posthumous work of Dr. Newberry’s. Turning
instantly to the magnificent plates, I recognized some of my early
specimens, the first I ever collected that were of value to science.
Although, owing to the long delay in publication, I lost credit for
them, and the duplicates which I had given to a friend had been used by
Lesquereux to illustrate some new species accredited to that friend
instead of to their rightful discoverer, Dr. Newberry kindly
acknowledged my work on p. 133 of his book, where he says: “The leaf
figured on Plate X and that represented on Plate XI were included in a
collection made by Charles H. Sternberg, and Lesquereux has done only
justice to him by attaching his name to the finest species contained in
the large collection of fossil plants he made there,” that is, at
Sassafras Hollow.
In 1872, just before Lesquereux’s great work, “The Cretaceous Flora,”
appeared, I learned that the famous botanist was a guest of Lieutenant
Benteen, the commander of Fort Harker. Fortunately, I had retained rough
sketches of the first specimens I had sent to the Smithsonian
Institution. So with these I started for the Post, where I found a
reception in progress in honor of the noted guest.
I was introduced to the venerable botanist by his own son, who spoke to
him in French, as he was almost deaf. When I displayed my sketches, he
took me to one side, and in a corner of the room I told him the story of
my discoveries. His eyes shone when he examined the drawings. “This is a
new species,” he said, “and this, and this. Here is one described and
illustrated from poorer material.”
I do not remember how long we talked. I only know that the golden
moments sped by all too rapidly; and from that hour until his death in
1889 we were in constant correspondence.
After this all my collections were sent to him for description. Over
four hundred species of plants like those of our existing forests along
the Mexican Gulf, some beautiful vines, a few ferns, and even the fruit
of a fig, and a magnolia flower petal, the only petal so far found in
the coarse sandstone of the Dakota Group, have rewarded my earnest
efforts. The fragrance of this lovely flower seems wafted down to us
through the myriads of ages since it bloomed.
Dr. Arthur Hollick, in his paper, “A Fossil Petal and a Fruit from the
Cretaceous (Dakota Group) of Kansas,” in Contributions from the New York
Botanical Garden, No. 31, says, on page 102: “Included in a collection
of fossil-plant remains from the Cretaceous (Dakota Group) of Kansas,
recently obtained by the New York Botanical Garden from Charles H.
Sternberg of Lawrence, Kansas, are two exceedingly interesting
specimens,—one representing a large petal, the other a fleshy fruit.
Petals are exceedingly rare, and I am not acquainted with any published
figure of anything of the kind which can compare with ours in regard to
either size or satisfactory condition of preservation.”
Of the fig, the Doctor remarks: “The fruit is plainly that of a fig,
and, although some twenty-three species of _Ficus_ have been described
from the Dakota Group, they were based upon leaf impressions. This
fossil has every appearance of many dried herbarium specimens, and it is
evident that it must have possessed considerable consistency in order to
retain its original shape, as it has done to a certain extent, under the
pressure to which it must have been subjected.”
In 1888 I sent over three thousand leaf impressions from the Dakota
sandstone to Dr. Lesquereux, and he selected from them over three
hundred and fifty typical specimens, many of them new, for the National
Museum. Hundreds of others, identified by him, were afterwards purchased
by R. D. Lacoe, of Pittston, Pa., and presented to the Museum.
So feeble had the great botanist become in these last years of his life,
that friends passed before his failing eyes the trays containing these
great collections.
In my estimation, America can show no life more unselfishly devoted to
science than that of Lesquereux, probably the most scholarly and
conscientious botanist of his day. He once wrote me that he received a
salary of five dollars a day from the U. S. Geological Survey, and out
of this he had to pay his artist. He labored with unfailing enthusiasm
to complete his monumental work, “The Flora of the Dakota Group,” but by
the irony of fate, he never saw his beloved book in print. It was
published by the Government five years after his death, under the able
editorship of Dr. F. H. Knowlton.
He passed away at the age of eighty-three.
“Born in the heart of Switzerland’s mountain grandeur,” he once said,
“my associations have been almost all of a scientific nature. I have
lived with nature,—the rocks, the trees, the flowers. They know me, I
know them. Everything else is dead to me.”
[Illustration]
Columbus O 14th April 75
Mr Ch. Sternberg Fort Harker
My dearest
I much approve of your purpose of studying medicine. Your taste for
natural history will help you much and encourage you. But allow me
still to say to you as a friend would do that you can not expect to
become useful to others and to yourself in science except by hard
work, pursued with patience and a final purpose. Science is a high
mountain. To go up to its top or at least high enough to gain free
atmosphere and wide horizon necessitates hard climbing, through
brushes, thickets, rocks, etc. Then when from the beginning look
around for commodious and soft paths merely enter the gloom of the
woods at the base. They are seen from nobody and see nothing but
undistinct forms and because there horizon is thus liberated to
darkness they think there is nothing else and nothing more to learn
from high above toward the top of the mountain. Moreover there is
not a true hard step as Science or in life which does not give its
reward in one way or another. While we have not a single moment of
lazziness of unmerited comfortable rest, which does not bring us
some kind of disappointment and has sent of be fraid by a little
more trouble and word.
Yours very truly
L. Lesquereux
It was my good fortune to be in constant correspondence with Lesquereux,
and his letters, which I need not say I prize highly, have done more,
perhaps, than any other thing to fix my determination that, come what
might, I would be a fossil hunter and add my quota to human knowledge.
The letter here reproduced has been as a lodestar to lead me on past all
discouragements in the path which as a boy of seventeen I set out to
follow. May it shed light upon the life of some other straggler!
In 1897, not having the means to go into the vertebrate fields of
western Kansas, I spent three months in the Dakota Group, although I
knew that I had already supplied most of the museums of the world with
examples of its flora, and that there was little interest in or demand
for the leaves.
I secured over three thousand leaves, however, and paid first-class
freight on them to my home at Lawrence. Then I hauled them out to my
little twenty-acre farm, four miles southeast of town, and pitched my 9
× 9 wall-tent for a workshop, flooring it and putting up a stove. There
I worked from November to May, standing on my feet on an average of
fourteen hours a day, with my face to the opening of the tent for light,
and my back to the stove. At night I worked over a coal-oil lamp.
With a chisel-edged hammer weighing two ounces, I trimmed off the rough
stone from the margin of the nodules, as illustrated in the woodcuts by
Christian Weber of New York (Fig. 5, _c_, _d_, _e_, and _f_), a labor of
love on his part, for which I am deeply grateful. I smoothed down the
rock with emery-stone also, and with a No. 1 needle pried away the stone
from the petioles, leaving the impression as if it were the leaf itself
standing up in bold relief, thus bringing out all its beauty. One of my
neighbors, after examining the prepared specimens, remarked, “You must
have taken a long time to carve those things. Why, they look just like
leaves!”
When no more loving labor could be bestowed on them without risk of
injuring the specimens, I laid them away in trays, to be numbered and
identified. I knew that some authorities demanded the specimens in
payment for the labor of identification, and as I had to make a living
out of my work, this would never do for me. So after Lesquereux’s death
I undertook the work of identification myself, although I confess it
hurt my conscience, as I had never had the training of a botanical
authority. I was greatly relieved, therefore, when, after selling two
hundred and fifty specimens to the New York Botanical Gardens, I asked
Dr. Arthur Hollick whether my identifications were correct, to receive
the answer that upon a casual examination he could find no reason to
make any changes in my names. I was certainly much encouraged by such
words from this eminent authority in fossil botany.
To return to my great collection from the Dakota Group, I spent nine
months of incessant labor upon it, and my readers may be surprised to
learn that I was delighted when Professor Macbride, of the University of
Iowa, purchased it for the munificent sum of three hundred and fifty
dollars, the price I put upon it. My delight was even greater when I
received the following letter, which is now and was then more highly
prized than the check which it enclosed.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA.
BOTANY.
Iowa City, Iowa, May 1, 1898.
DEAR MR. STERNBERG:
The boxes are all safely here. We have at present no place for the
display of the specimens, but have opened the first three cases and
are delighted with the beauty of the material. I hope next year to
have a case for fossil plants, when I shall certainly make a display
of these beautiful leaves, and quote you as collector. I should
think the National Museum would give you employment all the time.
I trust you may have a pleasant and profitable summer, and if in
future I can in any way serve you, kindly advise me.
Very truly yours,
THOMAS K. MACBRIDE.
This small sum enabled me to go with my son George into the chalk of
Kansas, where we discovered the splendid specimen of a mosasaur, now in
the museum of Iowa University. But for the timely assistance given me
when I most needed help, it is doubtful whether Iowa would have secured
this treasure. My months of patient labor on the leaves had convinced
the authorities that my work on the mosasaur would be faithfully done.
Before closing this account of my work in the Dakota Group, I should
like to say a few words about the manner in which the nodules are formed
around leaf impressions, a subject of which I have made a careful study
during years of exploration. The illustrations (Fig. 5, _a_ and _b_)
show the nodules before they are opened, and the open specimens before
they have been trimmed, as in the other cuts.
The mother rock, or matrix, as it is called, from which these
concretions come, is quite soft and easily disintegrates into yellowish
sand under the influences of the weather. Through this yellowish
sandstone are scattered countless leaf impressions and their
counterparts, but on account of the softness of the matrix it is
impossible to work out any leaves from the inside of the rock masses,
and we should lose them altogether were it not for the following natural
process:
Falling from the trees that grew along the shore of the Cretaceous
Ocean, these leaves were covered with sand by the incoming tide. Some,
falling stem first, were turned over into a U-shape; others are found
lying flat, and others again at various angles. The sand, accumulating
through the years, finally became consolidated, and, being in course of
time exposed to the air, began to “weather.” In the meantime the iron
coloring matter of the vegetation had been dissolved out by the water
and distributed through the rock mass. As the rock weathers away, the
leaf impressions are hardened by the iron that has been dissolved out of
the sandy mass by water holding acids in solution.
As the soft rock about them continues to wear away, the nodules begin to
appear above the surface, at first only as bumps slightly elevated above
the surrounding rock, but in time as complete concretions, with the form
of the leaves imprisoned within, which are left standing on pedestals no
thicker than a lead pencil.
Then the first storm of rain or hail breaks them from their moorings;
they become independent, are reduced in size, and constantly hardened,
so that often a nodule is almost pure iron ore a fraction of an inch in
thickness.
So the process goes on and will continue until all the leaves within the
parent rock have been protected by an iron envelope; and it is this
natural process alone which can save these beautiful impressions from
falling to pieces when the sand is freed from the rock by
disintegration.
The locality from which I collected these specimens I have named the
_Betulites_ locality, on account of the abundance of birch leaves of
many varieties which have been found there. It was discovered by the
late Judge E. P. West, collector for the University of Kansas, and
Professor Lesquereux honored him by calling one species _Betulites
westii_. He made a wonderful collection of Dakota leaves for the
University, many of them new to science. The locality is about a mile in
length and tops the highest hills in Ellsworth County.
I have no record of the thousands of fossil leaves I have collected from
the sandstone of central Kansas. I have never kept a single specimen for
myself, although I love them dearly, and it has often been hard to give
them up. But the object of my life has been to advance human knowledge,
and that could not be accomplished if I kept my best specimens to
gratify myself. They had to go, and they went, often for less than they
cost me in labor and expense, into the hands of those who could give
authoritative knowledge of them to the world, and preserve them in great
museums for the benefit of all.
One thing I have demanded as my right, in my opinion an inalienable
right, although I am sorry to say that there are those who have denied
it to me,—I demand that my name appear as collector on all the material
which I have gathered from the rocks of the earth.
I might have sold to showmen or dealers; in fact I have the assurance of
one of the largest dealers in America that I made a great mistake in
selling directly to museums instead of through him. If I had done as he
advised, the thousands of fossils I have collected would have cost the
museums fifty per cent. more than they have, and my work would have been
measured by the money these dealers would have been pleased to allow me,
and I should never have been known as one of those who have devoted
their lives to the advancement of paleontology.
CHAPTER II
MY FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE KANSAS CHALK, 1876
I spent the winter of 1875 and ’76 as a student at the Kansas State
Agricultural College.
Here a party was gathered to explore western Kansas for fossils, under
the leadership of Professor B. F. Mudge, the enthusiastic state
geologist and a popular professor of the college. The expedition was to
be made under the auspices of Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale College,
whose efforts have secured for that institution the largest collection
perhaps in the world of American fossil vertebrates.
I made every effort in my power to secure a place in the party, but
failed, as it was full when I applied. It has always been hard, however,
for me to give up what I have determined to accomplish; so, although
almost with despair, I turned for help to Professor E. D. Cope, of
Philadelphia, who was becoming so well known that a report of his fame
had reached me at Manhattan.
I put my soul into the letter I wrote him, for this was my last chance.
I told him of my love for science, and of my earnest longing to enter
the chalk of western Kansas and make a collection of its wonderful
fossils, no matter what it might cost me in discomfort and danger. I
said, however, that I was too poor to go at my own expense, and asked
him to send me three hundred dollars to buy a team of ponies, a wagon,
and a camp outfit, and to hire a cook and driver. I sent no
recommendations from well-known men as to my honesty or executive
ability, mentioning only my work in the Dakota Group.
I was in a terrible state of suspense when I had despatched the letter,
but, fortunately, the Professor responded promptly, and when I opened
the envelope, a draft for three hundred dollars fell at my feet. The
note which accompanied it said: “I like the style of your letter.
Enclose draft. Go to work,” or words to the same effect.
That letter bound me to Cope for four long years, and enabled me to
endure immeasurable hardships and privations in the barren fossil fields
of the West; and it has always been one of the joys of my life to have
known intimately in field and shop the greatest naturalist America has
produced.
As soon as the frost was out of the ground, having secured a team of
ponies and a boy to drive them, I left Manhattan and drove out to
Buffalo Park, where one of my brothers was the agent. The only house,
beside the small station building, was that occupied by the section men.
Great piles of buffalo bones along the railroad at every station
testified to the countless numbers of the animals slain by the white man
in his craze for pleasure and money. A buffalo hide was worth at that
time about a dollar and a quarter.
Here at Buffalo I had my headquarters for many years. A great windmill
and a well of pure water, a hundred and twenty feet deep, made it a
Mecca for us fossil hunters after two weeks of strong alkali water. At
this well Professor Mudge’s party and my own used to meet in peace after
our fierce rivalry in the field as collectors for our respective
paleontologists, Marsh and Cope.
What vivid memories I have of that first expedition!—memories of
countless hardships and splendid results. I explored all the exposures
of chalk from the mouth of Hackberry Creek, in the eastern part of Gove
County, to Fort Wallace, on the south fork of the Smoky Hill, a distance
of a hundred miles, as well as the region along the north and south
forks of the Soloman River.
When we left Buffalo Station, we left civilization behind us. We made
our own wagon trails, two of which especially were afterwards used by
the settlers until the section lines were constructed. One of them ran
directly south, crossing Hackberry Creek about fifteen miles from the
railroad, at a point where there was a spring of pure water—a rare and
valuable find in that region. We camped here many times, and made such a
good trail that it was used for years. Our second trail extended across
the country, striking Hackberry Creek where Gove City now stands, and
led over Plum Creek Divide, whose high ledges of yellow chalk served us
as a landmark for twenty miles. From this point we could see Monument
Rocks, and near them the remains of an old one-company post on the Santa
Fé Trail. Our trail then led up the Smoky Hill to the mouth of Beaver
Creek, on the eastern edge of Logan County, and followed the old road as
far west as Wallace.
Prairie-dog villages extended west along all the water courses, and open
prairies to the state line, and we were rarely out of sight of herds of
antelope and wild horses. Near the present site of Gove City, on the
south side of Hackberry Creek, there is a long ravine with perpendicular
banks ten feet or more in height. This ravine was at that time used as a
natural corral by some men who made a business of capturing these wild
ponies by following them night and day, keeping them away from their
watering places, and giving them no chance to graze, until they were
exhausted. They were then easily driven into the ravine and roped; after
which they were picketed on the prairie and soon became tame. These wild
horses were swift travelers, and the most graceful of all the wild
animals of the West, being distinguished for the beauty of their flowing
manes and tails.
There was constant danger from Indians, and in order that we might
escape as much as possible the eagle eye of some scout who might be
passing through the country, our tent and wagon-sheet were of brown
duck. This blended with the dry, brown buffalo grass, as we traveled
from canyon to canyon, and could not be distinguished very far even by
the trained eye of an Indian.
I never carried my rifle with me. I left it in camp or in the wagon, for
I soon decided that I could not hunt Indians and fossils at the same
time, and I was there for fossils.
I had no unpleasant experiences with Indians, however, although I came
very near it once. It was one day late in June, when we were about three
miles north of Monument Rocks. A gentle rain early in the morning had
taken the glare from the chalk cliffs, and as this is a circumstance
favorable to the discovery of fossils, I shouldered my pick and started
down the canyon, eagerly scanning the rocks on either side.
About a mile below camp I was startled to come upon a pony trail, so
deeply cut into the soft chalk that I knew each horse must be carrying a
burden. It had been made within the hour, and as I was anxious to find
out what it meant, I took the back trail to the river. There I found
that a large band of warriors had sought shelter from the rain in a
willow thicket, tying bunches of the twigs together and throwing deer or
antelope skins over them to shed the water. They had squatted within
these shelters until the storm had passed, and then cooked their
breakfasts, as the live coals in many of the ash heaps testified.
There were no squaws or children along; it makes no difference whether
women are white or red, they always lose some of their belongings
wherever they go, and there was none of such property at this camp. The
ponies had been tied to the bushes and not allowed to graze, showing
that the party had not expected to camp here, but had simply taken
shelter from the rain to avoid the discomfort of traveling with wet
buckskin moccasins and leggings. I learned later that it was a large
band of Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, under their famous chief,
Crazy Horse, going north to join commands with Sitting Bull, in Montana.
The chalk beds which were the field of my labors once composed the floor
of the old Cretaceous ocean, and consist almost entirely of the remains
of microscopic organisms, which must have fairly swarmed in the water.
They were discovered by the late Dr. Bunn, of Lawrence, while a student
in the laboratories of the Kansas State University, after Dana and
others had said there was no chalk in America.
When the animals that inhabited this ocean died or were killed, their
carcasses, buoyed up by the gases that formed after death, floated about
on the surface of the water, losing a limb here, a head there, a trunk
or tail somewhere else. These detached fragments, sinking to the bottom,
were covered by the soft ooze of the ocean floor, and remained there as
fossils, while the sedimentary rock was being lifted three thousand feet
above sea level.
My explorations began on Hackberry Creek, where I went over every inch
of the exposed chalk, from the creek’s mouth to its head, in Logan
County. Then I searched the river and the ravines that cut into its
drainage area along the flanks of the divides.
* * * * *
Perhaps a description of a typical day’s experience in one of the long
ravines that gash the southern slope of the country may be of interest
to my readers.
Human beings, in order to accomplish any result of moment, must be
reasonably comfortable, that is, they must not be over-hungry or thirsty
or sleepy. If they are, their minds will dwell upon their discomforts,
and they will accomplish little, as the hungry boy, who keeps turning
his head in the direction of the sun and wondering whether it is not
almost dinner-time, is not likely to hoe much corn. My first step,
therefore, must be to find water and pitch a camp.
But often I have no idea where water is to be found, and must give as
much care to the search as if I were looking for fossils. So while the
driver follows me with the wagon, I hunt for water and fossils at the
same time.
Both sides of my ravine are bordered with cream-colored, or yellow,
chalk, with blue below. Sometimes for hundreds of feet the rock is
entirely denuded and cut into lateral ravines, ridges, and mounds, or
beautifully sculptured into tower and obelisk. Sometimes it takes on the
semblance of a ruined city, with walls of tottering masonry, and only a
near approach can convince the eye that this is only another example of
that mimicry in which nature so frequently indulges.
The chalk beds are entirely bare of vegetation, with the exception of a
desert shrub that “finds a foothold in the rifted rock” and sends its
roots down every crevice. This shrub is one of the fossil hunter’s worst
enemies. Sending its roots down the clefts in the rock, it searches out
the fossil bones that have been preserved there, and feasts upon them
until they have been entirely consumed, thus thriving at the expense of
God’s buried dead. More fine fossil vertebrates have been destroyed by
this plant than by the denudation of the rock, or the vandal hand of
man, although both of the latter have been powerful factors in the
destruction of fossils. In those days, however, there were no curiosity
hunters to dig up the precious relics, so that they were more abundant
than they are now.
All this time I am wandering along the canyon in search of water.
Sometimes I come upon gorges only two feet wide and fifty feet deep;
sometimes for five miles or more the sides of the ravine will be only a
few feet high.
I know that there is water at the river, but it is so far away from my
work that I go on and on in the hope of finding some nearer at hand.
Dinnertime comes, and the day is so hot that perspiration flows from
every pore. A howling south wind rises and fills our eyes with clouds of
pure lime dust, inflaming them almost beyond human endurance. Still no
water. The driver, with horses famishing for it, makes frantic gestures
to me to hurry. To ease my parched lips and swelling tongue, I roll a
pebble around in my mouth, or, if the season is propitious, allay my
thirst with the acid juice of a red berry that grows in the ravines.
After hours of search, I find in moist ground the borings of crawfishes;
with line and sinker I measure the depth to water a couple of feet below
in these miniature wells. The welcome signal is given to Will, the
driver, and he digs a well, so that both man and beast may be supplied.
If I could sum up all the sufferings I endured in the chalk fossil
fields, I should say that I suffered more from the lack of good drinking
water than from all the other ills combined. Except when we were in the
vicinity of one of the half-dozen springs that are scattered about over
an expanse of country a hundred miles long and forty wide, the only
water that we had to drink was alkali water, which has the same effect
upon the body as a solution of Epsom salts, constantly weakening the
system. Yet whole neighborhoods of settlers to this day have no other
water for themselves or their beasts, and they show the deteriorating
effects in their faces and their walk.
If I have found, scattered along a wash, the bones of some fossil fish
or reptile, as soon as we have pitched camp and eaten our meal of
antelope meat, hot biscuits, and coffee, we both return with pick and
shovel, and, carefully saving each weathered fragment, trace the remains
to where the rest of the bones lie _in situ_, as the scientists
say,—that is, in their original position in their rocky sepulcher.
Then comes the work in the hot sun, whose rays are reflected with added
fervor from the glaring surface of the chalk. Every blow of the pick
loosens a cloud of chalk dust, which is carried by the wind into our
eyes. But we labor on with unfailing enthusiasm until we have laid bare
a floor space upon which I can stretch myself out at full length. Lying
there on the blistering chalk in the burning sun, and working carefully
and patiently with brush and awl, I uncover enough of the bones so that
I can tell what I have found, and so that when I cut out the rock which
holds them I shall not cut into the bones themselves.
After they have been traced, if they lie in good, hard rock, a ditch is
cut around them, and by repeated blows of the pick, the slab which
contains them is loosened.
This is then securely wrapped and strengthened with plaster or with
burlap bandages that have been dipped in plaster of the consistency of
cream. In the case of large specimens, boards are put lengthwise to
assist in strengthening the material, so that it will bear
transportation. Later I hope to tell of a method, originated by me, by
which the most delicate fossil, even if preserved in very loose, friable
rock, may be detached and transported safely.
So, as a hunter will follow the deer, through thickets and over rocks,
forgetting hunger and cold and thirst in his anxiety to get a glimpse of
his game, that he may add its antlers to his list of trophies, we fossil
hunters, Professor Mudge’s party and my own, sought our prey over miles
and miles of barren chalk beds, cheerfully enduring countless
discomforts.
Urged on by enthusiasm and the desire to secure finer and finer
material, I went over every inch of the acres of exposed chalk along
these ravines and creeks, hoping each moment to find stretched before my
delighted eyes a complete skeleton of one of those old sea serpents
described by Cope, or a specimen of that wonderful _Pteranodon_, or
toothless flying reptile, whose wing expanse was twenty feet or more.
All day, from the first streak of light until the last level ray forced
me to leave the work, I toiled on, forgetting the heat and the miserable
thirst and the alkali water, forgetting everything but the one great
object of my life—to secure from the crumbling strata of this old ocean
bed the fossil remains of the fauna of Cretaceous Times.
The incessant labor, however, had a weakening effect upon my system so
that I fell a victim to malaria, and when a violent attack of shaking
ague came on, I felt as if fate were indeed against me.
I remember how, one day, when I was in the midst of a shaking fit, I
found a beautiful specimen of a Kansas mosasaur. _Clidastes tortor_ Cope
named it, because an additional set of articulations in the backbone
enabled it to coil. Its head lay in the center, with the column around
it, and the four paddles stretched out on either side. It was covered by
only a few inches of disintegrated chalk.
Forgetting my sickness, I shouted to the surrounding wilderness, “Thank
God! Thank God!” And I did well to thank the Creator, as I slowly
brushed away the powdered chalk and revealed the beauties of this
reptile of the Age of Reptiles. Its snake-like tail and flexible
movements caused it to appear to Cope a veritable serpent, so that he
put it in his new sub-order _Pythonomorpha_.
I well remember the terrible journey over the rough sod to the station
with this specimen. I was seized with another attack of ague, and as I
jolted about in the bottom of the wagon, I thought that my head would
surely burst. Little I cared, though, so that I got my beloved fossil to
the Professor.
[Illustration:
FIG. 6.—SKULL AND FRONT LIMB OF _Clidastes tortor_.
As collected and preserved by Charles Sternberg. (Now mounted in the
Carnegie Museum.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 7.—SKELETON OF _Clidastes tortor_.
(In American Museum of Natural History.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 8.—SKELETON OF RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_.
(In the American Museum of Natural History.)
]
And I felt amply repaid for my sufferings when the next winter I laid
out the skeleton on the platform of St. George’s Hall, in Philadelphia,
where the Professor spoke for an hour to a spellbound audience,
unfolding to them the wonders of the creatures that lived when this old
world was young. At the close, which came suddenly, as was usually the
case in Cope’s speeches, before the people had had time to come back
from the misty past, he turned to where I was sitting on a step, and
beckoned me to him. When I got within reach, he turned me around to the
audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you
Mr. Sternberg, the man who found this beautiful example of the fauna of
the Cretaceous.”
He was much pleased with the hearty applause that greeted me.
This incident illustrates one of the characteristics of Cope which
endeared him to all his collectors. He did not think that the money he
paid them paid for the dangers and privations they endured, far from
their friends and the comforts of civilization. On the contrary, he gave
them credit in all his publications for their discoveries of species new
to science. And this is the one essential thing to the collector—at
least the true collector who values his labor as something that cannot
be measured by money. All work done for science has a value above that
of money. Lesquereux might have made money if he had remained a
watchmaker, and Cope would have won a fortune as a ship-owner if he had
entered his father’s office, but both men realized that there is work
which offers higher rewards than riches; they gave their lives to
science, and they will never be forgotten.
But we are far afield; let us return to the plains and canyons of the
Kansas chalk beds.
I recall many trying experiences during that memorable first season.
Often we got into barren ground and walked over miles and miles of
blistering chalk with nothing to show for our trouble. In one locality
the remains might be very abundant, while in another, perhaps just as
promising in appearance, thousands of acres would be entirely barren.
But we had to go over it all before we could be sure that there was
nothing to repay our toil.
Once after two weeks of fruitless effort, we drove into a deep canyon,
cut into the upper or reddish chalks near Monument Rocks, which are so
much richer in fossils than the yellow or whitish beds farther east.
I had barely pitched the tent and got among the beds when I discovered
not only that I was the first collector to visit the canyon but that it
was rich in fossil remains. I found two specimens of _Platecarpus_, a
species of Kansas mosasaur, in a low knoll, separated by but three feet
of chalk.
At the same time one of those uncomfortable cold rains set in, and I was
not much encouraged when Will told me that we had no food left. There
was plenty of corn for the ponies, but no coffee, flour, bacon, or
canned goods, not even an antelope; and we were forty miles from our
base of supplies. I would not leave, however, without my load of
fossils, as I feared that during my absence my rivals would come upon
this Eldorado and clean it out. So the cook was told to parch a
kettleful of corn, and we made our meals on that. In fact, we filled our
pockets with it and lived on it for three days, eating most of the time
to keep ourselves sufficiently nourished.
We had always depended for fuel upon the buffalo chips which even then
were strewn about everywhere, but fortunately we found here an old dead
cottonwood tree, a rare thing in that region, where even the willows on
the river banks are short and stunted. But for this wood we should have
suffered.
We remained there until we had loaded our wagon with eight hundred
pounds of fossil vertebrates.
During the summer my constant use of a large butcher knife in cutting
away the chalk from specimens caused a felon to form in the palm of my
hand. A fistula resulted, and for ten days I slept but little, and could
not work in the field.
Finally, worn out by hard labor and constant attacks of ague, I felt
that my strength was failing, and called on Professor Cope for an
assistant. He sent me J. C. Isaac, from Illges Ranch, Wyoming; but
matters were not much improved, for Mr. Isaac had but a short time
before seen five of his companions shot down and scalped by a band of
marauding Indians, and only the swiftness of his horse had saved him
from the same fate. Consequently, he saw an Indian behind every bush;
and, although I had never been afraid before even when I learned that a
large party on the warpath had passed close to my camp, now, worn and
tired as I was, I became infected with his fears.
When I found that I could do nothing to get myself out of this mental
condition and be of further use to the Professor, I wrote to him, and
was ordered home for rest, to meet him later in Omaha, in company with
Mr. Isaac.
But before we return to civilization, will my readers go with me on
another expedition to these Kansas chalk beds? “How fleet is a glance of
the mind!” Instead of an arid, treeless plain, covered with short grass,
a great semi-tropical ocean lies at our feet. Everywhere along the
shores and estuaries are great forests of magnolia, birch, sassafras,
and fig, while a vast expanse of blue water stretches southward.
“But,” you ask, “what is that animal at full length upon the water in
that sheltered cove?”
Watch it a moment! It raises a long conical head, four feet in length
and set firmly upon a neck of seven strongly spined vertebræ. This
powerful head terminates in a long, bony rostrum, also conical in shape.
Back of the neck are twenty-three large dorsal vertebræ, followed by six
pygals, as Dr. Williston calls them, to which the hind arches and
paddles are attached. The body terminates in an eel-like tail of over
eighty elements, each strengthened by a dorsal spine above and a
V-shaped bone, called a chevron, below; so that a vertical section of
the lizard would have a diamond shape.
But see! an enemy in the distance is attracting our reptile’s attention.
It sets its four powerful paddles in motion, and unrolling its forked
tongue from beneath its windpipe, throws it forward with a threatening
hiss, the only note of defiance it can raise. The flexible body and long
eel-like tail set up their serpentine motion, and the vast mass of
animal life, over thirty feet in length, rushes forward with
ever-increasing speed through water that foams away on either side and
gurgles in a long wake behind.
The great creature strikes its opponent with the impact of a racing
yacht and piercing heart and lungs with its powerful ram, leaves a
bleeding wreck upon the water. Then raising its head and fore paddles
into the air, it bids defiance to the whole brute creation, of which it
is monarch.
A noble specimen of this great ram-nosed Tylosaur is now mounted as a
panel on the wall of the American Museum, in New York, at the head of
the stairs on the right (Fig. 8); and a little further on, is a splendid
skull of the same species, which I discovered on Butte Creek, in Logan
County. Fig. 9 shows a restoration of this species.
Doubtless many of the ankylosed bones which we fossil hunters often find
in the chalk of the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous were broken by
blows from these ram-nosed lizards.
We have in Kansas three genera of these mosasaurs as the celebrated
Frenchman, Cuvier, named them in 1808. The word literally means a
reptile of the Meuse, and it was given them because the first specimen
ever found was taken from the quarries under the city of Maestricht, on
the River Meuse. For this information, and for much more as to the
anatomy of the Kansas mosasaurs, I am indebted to Dr. Williston’s
splendid work in Volume IV of the University Geological Survey of
Kansas: Paleontology, Part I; although, of course, I obtained most of my
knowledge from the hundreds of specimens which I collected myself.
Among these are four especially fine specimens, nearly complete, of the
flat-wristed _Platecarpus coryphæus_ Cope. One of them I sent to the
Iowa State University, with head, column, and limbs nearly in position,
and still bedded in their native chalk. This fellow, who was over
eighteen feet long, must have sunk so deep in the slimy mud of the
ocean-bed that even the gases formed in his stomach could not lift his
body to the surface. A second specimen was sent to the British Museum of
Natural History, in London; a third to Munich, Bavaria, and a fourth to
the Roemer Museum, in Hildesheim, Germany.
[Illustration:
FIG. 9.—RAM-NOSED TYLOSAUR, _Tylosaurus dyspelor_.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 10.—SKULL OF THE FLAT-WRISTED MOSASAUR, _Platecarpus coryphæus_.
(In the Kansas State University.)
]
This last specimen is the best I ever took from the Kansas chalk until
1907. It is twenty-five feet long. Unfortunately, the head was all
washed away, with the exception of the mandibles and a few bones of the
skull. The most remarkable feature of this specimen was the presence,
for the first time in my experience, of the complete cartilaginous
breastbone with the cartilaginous ribs, which are very rare. They were
described for the first time from the noble Bourne specimen, by Dr. H.
F. Osborn, of the American Museum.
This mosasaur, _Platecarpus_, is the most common species known, and is
almost as large as the big _Tylosaurus_. It differs from the latter,
however, in the shape of the short, strong paddles and the blunt
rostrum. The skull in the illustration (Fig. 10) is that of a very fine
specimen, one of my discoveries, which was mounted by Mr. Bunker, of the
natural history department in the Kansas State University. I have never
seen a more complete skull, or one that shows the height so well, in any
specimen, unless it is the little _Clidastes velox_, in the Kansas
University collection. You will notice the triangular shape of the head,
with the strong bones arching back to support the lower jaw by the
pulley-like quadrate bone. Notice also that the suspensorium, instead of
curving down so that its groove fits over the rounded edge of the
quadrate, is straightened out. This is caused by its having been
flattened and distorted, as nearly all fossils are, by the immense
pressure to which it has been subjected. Observe the conical shape of
the head in front of the eye-rim, terminating in the hard, blunt
rostrum. It is believed by the authorities that a blow from this ram,
delivered at full speed, would put an adversary out of commission.
But how did this creature feed itself, when all its teeth are for
grasping, none for masticating? And how did it hold its prey, when it
has no claw-armed fingers, only weak paddles for swimming?
In answering these questions, we shall describe two characteristics of
the mosasaurs which differentiate them from all other reptiles.
If you will look closely at the photograph, you will notice, within the
head, and below the eye-socket, a row of recurved teeth. These are the
teeth on the pterygoid bones, which are located on either side of the
roof of the mouth, near the gullet, and are provided with twelve teeth,
more or less. The lower jaw with its powerful sweep on its fulcrum,
pressed the living prey firmly upon these teeth so that it could not
come forward and escape. Then notice the ball-and-socket joint just back
of the tooth-bearing bone or dentary, of the lower jaw. After the
wriggling, struggling prey had been fastened on the teeth in the roof of
the mouth, the mandibles were shortened by a spreading of this central
joint, and the victim was forcibly pushed down the throat.
The species _Clidastes velox_ of these Kansas mosasaurs, was, as its
name indicates, very agile, with beautiful bones of so firm a texture
that they have suffered less than any of the other fossil vertebrates
from the vast pressure to which they have been subjected, not only from
the enormous amount of material that has been heaped above them, but
from the still more powerful upward push which has raised their
burial-place three thousand feet above sea level.
I sent one very beautiful specimen of _Clidastes_ to Vassar College; so
complete, in fact, that it can be made into a panel mount.
I think no artist has more fully appreciated what these great reptiles
must have been when alive than Mr. Sidney Prentice, now of the Carnegie
Museum, whose beautiful restoration, made to illustrate Dr. Williston’s
work on Kansas Mosasaurs, is here reproduced (Fig. 11_b_). I am under
obligations to him for the labor of his pencil. He has certainly put
life into this denizen of the old Cretaceous ocean, and I do not believe
that anyone, after a careful study of the skeleton, could find any fault
with the restoration, from a scientific standpoint.
In this connection, I should like also to call attention to the
beautifully preserved skull I sent to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen
shows a complete side view of the head, with mandibles and maxilla, the
teeth interlacing as perfectly as in life. The sclerotic plates that
protect the eyeball are also in natural position.
The luxuriant life of the Cretaceous ocean was certainly remarkable.
Fish swarmed everywhere, and often, as the specimens are uncovered, the
scales are picked up by the wind, crumbled into dust, and scattered in
every direction.
Among the most common of the fossil bones in those early days were those
of a huge fish, whose vertebræ, with fragments of heads and jaws, were
found in great abundance, although no perfect specimen has been
discovered. Professor Cope, who described this fish, called it _Portheus
molossus_. I secured a fine specimen on Robinson’s ranch, in Logan
County. It lay in a small exposure of chalk along a grassy hill slope,
within a stone’s throw of the ranch buildings. My son George was my
assistant then, and we got out this specimen in the month of November.
Our boarding place was five miles away, and every night the ground froze
hard. Nothing daunted, we went to work with a will.
The head and trunk region had already been uncovered, and many of the
ribs and spines had been swept away and lost. We took up the head and
front fins in a great slab of plaster, as the chalk in which they lay
had disintegrated under the influence of the frost. A violent windstorm
was raging at the time, and to complete the slab, George had to bring
water from a tank a hundred yards away. I can still see that boy running
up with his pail of water, trying to carry it so that it would not be
emptied by the raging, howling wind that was almost tearing his coat
from his back, while I stood and shouted, “Hurry up! The plaster’s
hardening!”
The rest of the column, to the tail, we took up separately, and as the
great tail-fins and many of the caudal vertebræ were present with their
spines, embedded in solid chalk, we removed five feet of superincumbent
rock, cut a trench around the slab containing the bones, and took it up
by digging under it.
This made another huge mass to be handled. The section containing the
head weighed over six hundred pounds, and this tail section almost as
much. The latter froze solid before we could get it up to the tent,
where we kept a fire burning to dry out the water from the bones and
thus prevent the injurious effects of freezing. I should like just here
to express my gratitude to those ranchmen who gave their time and
strength to assist me in handling these huge sections.
When they had been packed with excelsior in strong boxes, a wagon was
backed up against the level platform which we had made in throwing out
the rock and soil that lay over the specimen. The boxes were then set on
edge, and, with the help of boards and rollers, loaded into the wagon
for shipment to the railroad thirty miles away.
But my troubles with this specimen were not over; on the contrary, they
had just begun. When the section containing the head was being raised on
to a table in my shop it fell and its weight was so great that the head
was badly shattered, as was the plaster that secured the bones in place
below.
Then all through the winter, while I was trying to dry out the specimen,
so that it could be cleaned and prepared for shipment, the rats, which
inhabited the walls of the laboratory in great numbers, kept pulling out
the bran and excelsior that had been put around the delicate bones to
protect them; thus causing the broken plaster, with the bones of the
head, to sink lower and lower, as the packing was carried away from
underneath.
[Illustration:
FIG. 11.—RESTORATION OF KANSAS CRETACEOUS ANIMALS.
(From drawing by S. Prentice, after Williston.)
_a_, _Uintacrinus socialis_; _b_, _Clidastes velox_; _c_,
_Ornithostoma ingens_.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 12.—GIANT CRETACEOUS FISH, _Portheus molossus_ (above), compared
with a six-foot modern Tarpon (below).
By courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
]
Driven to think out some plan of saving the specimen from destruction, I
conceived the idea of shoving a number of wooden pegs of various lengths
under the broken fragments, so as to push them up into their places and
hold them firmly there. All the excelsior was then taken away from
beneath them, a frame of lumber made around the section, and the whole
space filled with plaster which held all the broken bones in place.
In this specimen I found for the first time a complete column of
eighty-five vertebræ, a very important find, as these vertebræ are of so
nearly the same size that in restoring an incomplete specimen there was
no way of estimating how many of them there ought to be, and for
anything to the contrary, one might go on adding them indefinitely, as a
certain man in Europe added an enormous number to his mounted specimen
of a _Zeuglodon_.
This now famous specimen is mounted above the Bourne Tylosaur, in the
corridor of the Halls of Paleontology, at the American Museum. Dr. Henry
Fairfield Osborn, in his report describing it, says: “The noble specimen
of which a preliminary description is here given, adds another to the
many services which Mr. Charles H. Sternberg has rendered to vertebrate
paleontology. It was secured by him in the year 1900, near Elkader,
Logan County, Kansas. Originally the specimen had been probably
complete, but portions of the skeleton, especially the ribs and spines,
were injured and partly removed by previous explorers. The fish was
purchased by the Museum in 1901, and mounted and partly restored, under
the direction of the writer, by Adam Hermann, with the able assistance
of Mr. A. E. Anderson. Total length, from tip of tail to a point
directly above premaxillaries, 15 feet, 8 inches. Length of skull, 2
feet, 2 inches. Spread of tail, 3 feet, 9 inches.” (Fig. 12.)
At the time it was mounted, this great predaceous fish of the Cretaceous
was said to be the most striking example of a fossil fish in any museum
of the world. Since that day, however, a still finer one has been sent
to the Carnegie Museum. This specimen is much superior to that at the
American Museum, as the ribs, spines, pelvic fins, arches, and anal fin
are in position.
I should certainly be guilty of a great injustice to my friend and the
friend of paleontology, Mr. W. O. Bourne, of Scott City, whose name has
already appeared in these pages in connection with the great Tylosaur in
the American Museum, if I did not give him due credit for his share in
the securing of this specimen. He discovered the splendid fish and
tumbled a small mountain over on top of it to hide it. Then he kindly
gave it to me, and after much digging, my son was able to get trace of
it. Mr. Bourne showed his wisdom in thus covering it up, not only from
the elements, but also from man, who, out of curiosity, has destroyed
some splendid examples of creative power. I shall mention one or two as
object lessons before I complete this history.
But let us put life into this fish, whose bones now lie in the Carnegie
Museum.
We are back again where the two mosasaurs did battle royal for our
enjoyment. Watch that ripple! It is caused by a shoal of mackerel
scurrying in toward shallow water, in a mighty column five feet deep.
They are flying for their lives, for they have seen behind them their
most terrible enemy, a monster fish with a muzzle like a bulldog’s, and
huge fangs three inches long projecting from its mouth. Two rows of
horrid teeth, one above and one below, complete its armature. The great
jaws, fourteen inches long and four deep, move on a fulcrum, and when
they have dropped to seize a multitude of these little fish, they close
with a vise-like power. The crushed and mangled remains pass down a
cavernous throat to appease a voracious appetite.
The powerful front fins are armed with an outer ray that moves on a
joint in the pectoral arch, a long recurved piece of solid bone,
enameled on the outer side and more powerful as a weapon than a
cavalryman’s sword. This single-edged sword is three feet long, and
commands the respect of its owner’s enemies, the great saurians, or
Kansas mosasaurs. Our fish has only to swim up close to the abdomen of a
sleeping reptile, and lay it open for several feet with one sudden
stroke. If that is not sufficient, a slap of the powerful tail, with a
span of nearly four feet, finishes the work.
But see! nearer and nearer the great fish comes, mouthful after mouthful
of the fishes falling into its horrid jaws. It must be starving; so
eager is it for its prey that it seems unconscious of the fact that the
tide has turned and is moving outward. Now it discovers its danger and
turns, but too late. The water has gone back to the deep, leaving it
struggling for breath in a shallow pool. It thrashes wildly about with
its tail, whose sticky secretions help to envelop it more and more
thickly with mud and slime, until at last its struggles cease.
And then the scene changes. The old ocean disappears, and we stand,
George and I, three thousand feet above sea level, on Hay Creek, in
Logan County, among crumbling ruins of denuded and eroded chalk; and
working with pick and shovel in the burning sun, we bring the mighty
carcass once more to the light of day.
But I hope to take my readers into this field again, and will pass on
now to my expedition in the Bad Lands with Professor Cope.
CHAPTER III
EXPEDITION WITH PROFESSOR COPE TO THE BAD LANDS OF THE UPPER CRETACEOUS,
1876
About the first of August, 1876, Mr. Isaac and I were in Omaha, awaiting
the arrival of Professor Cope from Philadelphia.
We met him at the depot, and I remember his watching me with
astonishment as I limped along the street on my crippled leg. At last,
turning to Isaac, whom he knew to be a horseman, he asked, “Can Mr.
Sternberg ride a horse?”
Isaac answered: “I’ve seen him mount a pony bareback and cut out one of
his mares from a herd of wild horses.”
That satisfied the Professor, and when we got to Montana, he gave me the
worst-tempered pony in the bunch.
We were soon hurrying along over the treeless plains of Nebraska,
gaining in altitude every hour, until we reached the highlands of the
Great Divide, and plunged down into Weber and Echo canyons, whose
forests are dwarfed into miniatures by the majesty of the mountains
about them.
It was the first time that I had ever been among these stupendous cliffs
and ranges, and I held my breath for very wonder as they unfolded before
my astonished vision. They soon became familiar sights enough, but
never, even when I gazed every day upon the three Tetons, with the snow
glistening in their gorges in midsummer, or upon the mighty ranges of
the Rockies, did I lose my feeling of awe at the power here displayed by
the almighty Architect who carved these wonderful canyons and set these
towering peaks as solemn sentinels over the works of His hands.
We had the pleasure of Mrs. Cope’s company as far as Ogden. Then we
three men, taking the narrow-gauge railway, went on to Franklin, Idaho.
Here the most uncomfortable journey I have ever experienced awaited
us,—six hundred miles in a Concord coach, through the dry, barren plains
of Idaho. Our six horses raised clouds of fine dust, which penetrated
our clothing and filled our eyes and ears, and, sticking to the
perspiration that oozed from every pore, soon gave us the appearance of
having the jaundice.
I cannot begin to describe the discomforts of that terrible ride. We
traveled ten miles an hour, day and night, stopping only for meals,
which cost us a dollar each, and consisted of hot soda biscuit, black
coffee, bacon, and mustard, without butter, milk, or eggs. If, worn out
from continued loss of sleep, we dozed off for a moment, a sudden lurch
of the coach into a chuck-hole would break our heads against a post or a
neighbor’s head. I remember that once when the Professor was almost
exhausted from lack of sleep I took his head in my arms and held it
there, so that he might get a few hours’ rest. I should like here to
express my gratitude to the fellow passengers who so often gave me a
seat by the driver, where, buttoned in by the leathern apron, I got more
than my share of sleep.
When we reached the mountains, the beauty of the scenery and the absence
of dust made the journey more endurable, but we had to walk up all the
steep ascents.
At Helena we laid off for a few days. There the news was fresh from the
battle-field, of Custer and the brave men who had followed him to death.
A letter of his, written just before he entered the valley of death, was
read to us by the proprietor of the hotel. I remember one sentence of
it: “We have found the Indians, and are going in after them. We may not
come out alive.”
All was excitement, and the Professor was strongly advised against the
folly of going into the neutral ground between the Sioux and their
hereditary enemies, the Crows. A member of either tribe might kill us,
and lay our death to the other tribe.
Cope, however, reasoned that now was our time to go into this region,
since every able-bodied Sioux would be with the braves under Sitting
Bull, while the squaws and children would be hidden away in some
fastness of the mountains. There would be no danger for us, he argued,
until the Sioux were driven north by the soldiers who were gathering
under Terry and Crook for the final struggle.
Judging from past experience, he concluded that we should have nearly
three months in which to make our collections in peace. We would leave
the field, he said, when we learned that the great chief was being so
closely pressed as to be forced to seek safety in flight to the soil of
Great Britain, across the Sweet Grass Mountains into Assiniboia.
His judgment proved good. It was not until November, when a heavy
snowstorm had covered both the fossil fields and grass for the ponies,
that Sitting Bull gave up the unequal struggle against cold and the Boys
in Blue, and retreated to a more friendly soil.
At Fort Benton we found a typical frontier town of that day,—streets
paved with playing-cards, and whisky for sale in open saloons and
groceries. Our presence had been heralded abroad during our stay in
Helena, and the Professor had difficulty in securing an outfit without
paying an exorbitant price for it They knew him to be a stranger, and
they “took him in.”
Finally, however, he secured four horses for the wagon. The wheelers
were worn-out mustangs, which we were obliged to punish constantly to
keep at work, while one of the leaders, a fine four-year-old colt, had
to be knocked down half a dozen times before he could be taught not to
balk and strike out with his fore feet at everyone who came within
reach. The other leader, old Major, was as true as steel, and often
saved the day, doing his duty nobly in spite of the miserable company in
which he was forced to work.
The first night Mr. Isaac and I slept outside the town, with the four
wagon horses and the three saddle ponies, which were all picketed with
new rope. In the middle of the night, we heard an animal groaning, and
rushed out, to find our four-year-old cut fearfully beneath the fetlocks
by the ropes. We had to cut him loose, help him up, and bind his wounds.
He was able to travel the next day, however, and his accident was not
altogether a misfortune, as he was too sore for some time afterwards to
show his natural disposition.
We drove down to the mouth of the Judith River, opposite Claggett, where
an Indian trader had a store inclosed in a stockade. Here we went into
camp. Across the river were the lodges of two thousand Crow Indians, who
were preparing for their annual buffalo hunt in this neutral ground,
where Sioux and Crow alike buried the hatchet while they hunted the game
that was their principal sustenance.
Mr. Isaac, with the dread of the Redman still in his heart, insisted
that we must protect the camp by standing guard over it turn and turn
about, and to pacify him, the guard was mounted. I took the first turn,
and Mr. Isaac the second.
The Professor did me the honor of sharing his tent with me, and we were
just dozing off when we heard Mr. Isaac shout “Halt!” Looking out, we
saw an Indian approaching, with his squaw behind him, the moonlight
bringing out their forms in bold relief.
“Halt! Halt!” called Isaac, leveling his Winchester, but the Indian,
followed by his faithful squaw, continued to advance up to the very
muzzle of the gun, repeating, “Me good Indian! Me good Indian!”
Cope dressed and went out, and found that the Indian had mistaken us for
illicit whisky dealers, and come over to get a supply. The Professor
told the man to go to sleep under the wagon, and at daylight to recross
and invite half a dozen of the principal chiefs to breakfast with us.
The two Indians lay down and went to sleep as directed, but they had
just begun to snore peacefully when Isaac’s turn at guard duty was over,
and he came to the wagon to wake the cook, a slow, heavy man, whose fat
cheeks had induced the Professor to believe that he could cook
digestible food. The scout Cope had hired was not on hand, although he,
as well as the cook, had demanded his pay in advance before he would
accompany us.
After much growling, the cook got up, and remembering that he had left
his shoes under the wagon, went to get them and came upon the sleeping
beauties. Without more ado, he seized their dirty blanket in both hands
and coolly hauled them out on to the open prairie. After which he
proceeded to get his shoes.
At four o’clock in the morning it was Cope’s turn to go on guard. He was
awakened, but as his Spencer carbine was at the bottom of his trunk, and
perhaps, too, because he was a Friend, and did not believe in war, he
refused to get up; and we slept in safety the rest of the night without
a guard.
Just before breakfast the Professor, as was his custom, was washing his
set of false teeth in a basin of water, when a party of six stalwart
chieftains strode up in single file, in answer to his invitation through
the brave we had entertained.
Quickly slipping the teeth into his mouth, Cope advanced with a smiling
face to greet his guests, who shouted as one man, “Do it again! Do it
again!” He repeated the performance for them again and again, much to
their mystification.
After they had tried to pull out their own and each other’s teeth, and
had failed, they settled down to breakfast. The cook poured out their
coffee for them, and when they had had enough they shouted, “When!”
We never knew whether this hospitality was of any benefit to us, as the
whole tribe went on their buffalo hunt, and we saw no more of them, but
very likely their chiefs forbade petty stealing from our camp, for we
lost nothing.
We crossed the Missouri, here a clear, sparkling stream, and the Judith
River, and went into camp in the narrow valley of Dog Creek, in the
midst of the fossil fields which we had come so far and at such risks to
explore.
All about us stretched the interminable labyrinths of the Bad Lands.
Above us lay twelve hundred feet of denuded rock, which Cope at that
time believed to belong to several formations. The rock consists of
great beds of black shale, which disintegrates on the surface into a
fine, black dust. The lower levels contain many beds of lignite, which
makes a good soft coal, and burns readily. We found beds four feet thick
along the canyons. All one had to do was to drive up to the face of the
cliff and load a wagon in a few minutes.
As soon as the first streak of daylight appeared, we breakfasted and
were off, our picks tied to our saddles, our collecting-bags dangling
from the pommels, and a lunch of cold bacon and hardtack in our
saddle-bags.
I usually rode beside the Professor, my mount a treacherous black
mustang, who was ever on the watch to regain his liberty. A curb bit
that almost tore his mouth to pieces was my only means of restraining
him. My right ear being totally deaf, I usually rode at the Professor’s
right, when the trail would admit of our traveling abreast. He was not
always in a talkative mood, but when he began to speak of the wonderful
animals of this earth, those of long ago and those of to-day, so
absorbed did he become in his subject that he talked on as if to
himself, looking straight ahead and rarely turning toward me, while I
listened entranced.
Not so that wicked black mustang of mine. Suddenly his front feet would
leave the ground, and he would stand up at full length on his hind legs.
Then feeling the gouging of the Spanish bit, he would drop and run ahead
to the Professor’s left side. When the Professor, happening to look up,
found the place where I had been vacant, he would exclaim in surprise,
“Why, I thought you were on my right, and here you are on my left!”
The pony repeated this trick whenever I became so deeply interested in
the Professor’s talk as to loosen my hold on the reins.
On the very top of the Bad Lands were the Judith River beds, now known,
through the researches of the late Professor J. B. Hatcher, to belong to
the Fort Pierre Group of the Upper Cretaceous. Here tablelands and level
prairies offered plenty of grass for our ponies; so we climbed to these
heights, picketed our horses, and went into the gorges in search of
fossils. It was necessary to give the loose shale the most careful
examination, as only a streak of dust a little different in color from
the uniform black around it, indicated where the bones were buried.
As a result of the loose composition of this friable black shale and the
overlying rocks of sandstone, the Missouri has lowered its bed twelve
hundred feet below the level of the prairies, and the whole country is
cut up by a perfect labyrinth of canyons and lateral ravines into a
dreary landscape of utter barrenness.
At night the view from above of these intricate passages was appalling.
The black material of which the rocks are composed did not permit a
single ray of light to penetrate the depths below, and the ebony-like
darkness seemed dense enough to cut.
Long ridges, terminating in perpendicular cliffs, whose bases impinge
upon the river a thousand feet below, extend back into the country for
miles. Often they are cut by lateral ravines into peaks and pinnacles,
obelisks and towers, and other fantastic forms. These ridges are so
narrow that we could hardly walk along them, and their sides drop at an
angle of forty-five degrees. It was only the disintegrated shale on the
surface, into which our feet sank at every step, that gave us a foothold
and kept us from shooting with frightful velocity into the gorges below.
One day the Professor asked me to climb to a point near the summit of a
lofty ridge, crowned by two massive ledges of sandstone, four feet
thick, which projected over the steep slope like the window sills of
some Titanic building. These ledges, one above the other and separated
by sixty feet of shale, had been swept clean for about three feet, so
that I found an easy pathway for my feet, when after laborious climbing
I reached the lower ledge. From my lofty perch I had a bird’s-eye view
of mile upon mile of the wonderful Bad Lands, a scene of desolation such
as no pen can picture.
It was my duty to search every square inch of the dust-covered slope
between the ledges for fossil bones. After much unsuccessful effort, I
came to a place at the head of a gorge, where a perpendicular escarpment
dropped downward for a thousand feet. The upper ledge of sandstone had
broken loose for a space of thirty feet, and this huge mass of rock,
four feet thick, carrying with it the loose dirt and polishing the
underlying surface as it thundered down the slope, had struck the lower
ledge with such force that it too had broken loose and plunged downward
into the abyss. A grove of pine trees at the base of the cliff had been
crushed to the earth by this avalanche. To my view the remaining trees,
which I knew to be about fifty feet high, appeared like seedlings, and
the vast mass of rock like a cobblestone.
I concluded that I should have no difficulty in crawling across the
smooth space, for I reasoned that if I began to slip, I could drive the
sharp end of my pick into the soft rock and thus stop myself. So,
climbing up the slope through the loose earth to the base of the upper
ledge, I started to cross. When I was halfway over I began to slip, and
confidently raising my pick, struck the rock with all my might. God
grant that I may never again feel such horror as I felt then, when the
pick, upon which I had depended for safety, rebounded as if it had been
polished steel, as useless in my hands as a bit of straw. I struck
frantically again and yet again, but all the time I was sliding down
with ever-increasing rapidity toward the edge of the abyss, safety on
either side and certain and awful death below.
I remember that I gave up all hope of escape, and that after the first
shock I felt no fear of death; but the few moments of my slide seemed
hours, measured by the rapidity with which my mind worked. Everything,
it seemed to me, that I had ever done or thought spread itself out
before my mind’s eye as vividly as the wonderful panorama of the cliffs
and canyons upon which I had been gazing a few moments before. All the
scenes of my life, from childhood up, were re-enacted here with the same
emotions of pleasure or pain. I saw distinctly the people I had known,
many of them long forgotten. My mother seemed to stand out more
prominently than anyone else, and I wondered what she would think when
she heard that I had been dashed to pieces. I even planned how, when I
did not return to camp, Cope would set out to find me, following my
footsteps into the loose dirt until he reached the slide, and I wondered
how he would ever get down into the canyon, and how much of my body
would be left for burial.
To this day I do not know how I escaped. I suddenly found myself lying
on the ledge, on the side I had left a moment before. Probably some part
of my clothing, covered with dust as it was, had acted as a brake upon
the polished surface. I lay for an hour with trembling knees, too weak
to make my way back to camp.
This experience of mine is another instance of the fact that the human
brain forgets nothing, and will yield up everything when the right kind
of stimulus is applied.
The excitement of our work and the danger with it seemed to make us
reckless of life, Professor Cope even more so than the rest of us,
although he was at that time United States Paleontologist, and worth a
million dollars. I remember one night he was following a buffalo trail
to the river, when suddenly his horse stopped and refused to go further.
Without dismounting to find out the cause, he plunged his spurs into the
animal, and it sprang into the air. Mr. Isaac, who was behind, followed.
The next day they were surprised to find that they had crossed a gorge
ten feet wide, and that but for the keen sight and the strength of their
horses, they would have been dashed to pieces a hundred feet below.
Cope’s indefatigability, too, was a constant source of wonder to us. We
were in excellent training, after our strenuous outdoor life in the
Kansas chalk beds, while he had just been working fourteen hours a day
in his study and the lithographer’s shop, completing a large Government
monograph, writing his own manuscript, and reading his own proof. When
we first met him at Omaha, he was so weak that he reeled from side to
side as he walked; yet here he climbed the highest cliffs and walked
along the most dangerous ledges, working without intermission from
daylight until dark.
Every night when we returned to camp, we found that the cook had spent
the whole day in cooking. Exhausted and thirsty,—we had no water to
drink during the day (all the water in the Bad Lands being like a dense
solution of Epsom salts),—we sat down to a supper of cakes and pies and
other palatable, but indigestible food. Then, when we went to bed, the
Professor would soon have a severe attack of nightmare. Every animal of
which we had found traces during the day played with him at night,
tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him.
When I waked him, he would thank me cordially and lie down to another
attack. Sometimes he would lose half the night in this exhausting
slumber. But the next morning he would lead the party, and be the last
to give up at night. I have never known a more wonderful example of the
will’s power over the body.
His memory and his imagination, too, were extraordinary. He used to talk
to me by the hour, arranging the living and dead animals of the earth in
systematic order, giving countless scientific names and their
definitions. I forgot the names as soon as I heard them, but the loving
tribute which he paid to the wonders of creation has had a lasting and
helpful effect upon me. If I ever had any feelings of disgust or fear
toward any of God’s creatures, I lost them upon a knowledge of the
animals as revealed to me by this master naturalist, who saw beauty even
in lizards and snakes. He believed, and taught me to believe, that it is
a crime to destroy life wantonly, any life. Of course the first law of
nature is self-preservation; we must, in order to live, kill our enemies
and protect our friends; but this superstitious fear which men and, even
more, women have of snakes, lizards, and bugs, how cruel it is! Why
should they rejoice when some poor little garter-snake, which has gone
as a friend into the cellar walk to destroy rats and mice, is dragged
out and cut to pieces? My heart bleeds when I think of the brutal way in
which people take life, something they can never give back, and with the
great Cope, I cry out against this crime, which is exterminating some of
our most beautiful and useful friends. No man can say he loves us, when
he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys
His creatures.
[Illustration:
FIG. 13.—_a_, LOWER JAW OF _Trachodon marginatus_, SHOWING SUCCESSIVE
LAYERS OF TEETH. _b_, TOP AND SIDE VIEWS OF A TOOTH OF _Myledaphus
bipartitus_.
(After Osborn and Lambe.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 14.—SKULL OF A DUCK-BILLED DINOSAUR, _Diclonius_, FOUR FEET IN
LENGTH. (In American Museum of Natural History.) Photo, by Matthew.
]
We found no complete specimens of any fossil animals during our stay on
Dog Creek, but near the summit of the Bad Lands, under beds of yellowish
sandstone, we came upon localities literally filled with the scattered
bones and teeth of dinosaurs, those terrible lizards whose tread once
shook the earth. They are represented now by the little horned toad of
central Kansas. Among the fragments were pieces of the finely-sculptured
shells of the sea turtles, _Trionyx_ and _Adocus_, and remains of that
strange dinosaur _Trachodon_ (Fig. 13_a_), whose teeth were arranged as
in a magazine, one below another, so that when the old teeth wore out,
others were ever ready to take their place.
The specimen in the illustration is from Drs. Osborn and Lambe’s
Contribution to Canadian Paleontology, on the Vertebrata of the
Mid-Cretaceous of the Northwest Territory (1902). The splendid
Cretaceous dinosaur here illustrated is from Wyoming (Fig. 14). This
last form was restored by the late Professor Marsh, and is now mounted
in the museum of Yale University. What a strange picture it presents,
this great plant-eater, as, standing on its hind limbs, its powerful
tail acting as the third leg of a tripod, it grasps the branches of a
tree with its weak hands and arms, while its teeth scrape off the tender
leaves!
In one of these localities we found teeth belonging to some extinct
ray-like fish that were arranged in the roof and floor of the mouth like
bricks in a pavement, forming a sort of mill which ground up the shells
upon which the creature subsisted. A strange thing about these teeth was
that one side of the enamel was white and the other black. Cope called
the species _Myledaphus bipartitus_ (Fig. 13_b_).
The diamond-shaped enameled scales of the _Lepidotus_, an ancient
relative of the gar-pike, were very common, as were also the teeth of
several species of dinosaurs besides those already mentioned.
To-day the great museums of the country have complete or nearly complete
skeletons of these creatures, the largest land animals that ever
inhabited the earth. The splendid specimen of _Brontosaurus_ (Fig. 16)
in the American Museum at New York is over sixty feet long. Nothing so
fires the imagination as a visit to the halls where these ancient
lizards now stand.
I am delighted that recent authorities, Drs. Osborn and Lambe, have
given Professor Cope credit for these discoveries of his in 1876,
discoveries which are made the more memorable by the fact that he was
the first scientist who had the foresight and the courage to explore
these fossil beds after Dr. Hayden, their original discoverer, was
driven out of the region by Blackfeet Indians. Indeed, the chief purpose
of this chapter is to put forward the claim that Professor Cope, Mr.
Isaac, and myself made the first real collection of these wonderful
saurians.
[Illustration:
FIG. 15.—PROFESSOR E. D. COPE.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 16.—BRONTOSAURUS OR THUNDER LIZARD.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
After satisfying himself that there were no skeletons more or less
complete on Dog Creek, Cope took the guide and went off down the river
to Cow Island, forty miles below. This point was the head of navigation
on the Missouri in October, the water then being so low that the
steamboat could not get up to Fort Benton. The last boat came up on the
fifteenth of October, to carry a load of ore and passengers down to the
railroad at Omaha, and as the Professor had decided to take this boat,
it was necessary for him to be on hand when it arrived.
A few days later he sent word to us on Dog Creek to break camp and
proceed, according to the scout’s directions, to Cow Island with all the
outfit. This was no easy task; in fact, at first sight it appeared
impossible. No wagon had ever before rolled down those steep hillsides.
Mr. Isaac, however, took command, and, after removing everything from
the wagon except the Professor’s trunk, which could neither be packed on
a horse nor carried by hand, we began our journey up the long twelve
hundred feet to the prairies above.
Working with axes, picks, and shovels, we cut trees, bridged chasms, and
made roads, climbing upward step by step, until in the afternoon we
reached what for the moment threatened to be the end of our journey.
Before us rose the sloping side of a ridge, covered entirely with loose
shale, and so steep that it was impossible to climb it even on horseback
without making a long diagonal across its flank. At the summit the ridge
was narrow enough to be straddled by a wagon, and it sloped down at the
same angle on the other side.
The teamster refused to go any further, and this angered Isaac, who said
that he would drive himself. So he unhitched the lead horses, and
climbing the wagon, urged on the stupid mustangs. One walked in a trail
that we had made, the other in the loose dirt below.
I was a good deal concerned as to the fate of both man and team, but
experience had taught me the folly of arguing with an angry man; so I
sat on my horse and waited for the outcome. Isaac had driven about
thirty feet above the level floor, when the inevitable happened. I saw
the wagon slowly begin to tip, pulling the ponies over sideways, and
then the whole outfit, wagon and horses, began to roll down the slope.
Whenever the wheels stuck up in the air, the ponies drew in their feet
to their bellies, and at the next turn, stretched out their legs for
another roll.
My heart was in my mouth for fear that Isaac would be killed in one of
the turns, or that wagon and all would roll over a thousand-foot
precipice below, but after three complete turns, they landed, the horses
on their feet, the wagon on its wheels, on a level ledge of sandstone,
and stood there as if nothing had happened.
When I saw that Isaac was safe, I could not help laughing, and in
consequence was told that if I was so smart I could get up the slope
myself. I quickly gave orders that the picket ropes be tied together and
fastened to the hind axle of the wagon, and that the horses be led
singly up the trail. The rope was then carried to the top of the ridge,
and the horses were hitched to it, and driven down the steep slope on
the opposite side, thus drawing up the wagon. We then righted it so that
it straddled the ridge and could be safely hauled out to the level
prairie.
After this we had to go back on horses and bring the camp outfit, which
we had left at Dog Creek, to the wagon.
About three o’clock that afternoon our scout, who had not showed up
during the heavy labor of getting the outfit up to the prairie, was seen
coming from the south through a break in the foothills, while at the
same time another horseman approached at full speed from the east. At a
sign from the scout, our driver stopped his horses, and Isaac and I
rested in our saddles.
The second horseman soon proved to be Professor Cope, who galloped up to
the guide and stopped him, the gestures of the two men and the sound of
their raised voices indicating that an animated argument was going on
between them. Finally the scout, his face heated and scowling, came up
to the wagon, and without a word, got out his roll of blankets and extra
clothing, and started off in the direction of Fort Benton.
The cook shouted after him, and then, springing from the wagon, followed
him. When they were out of earshot, the scout stopped, and the two began
an excited conversation. Then it was the cook’s turn to show of what
poor stuff he was made, for, coming back to the wagon, he loaded his
blankets and grip on his broad shoulders, and struck out on foot for a
wood-camp a few miles to the north, on the river.
When Cope came up he told us that these two men, whom he had paid in
full for three months’ work, had deserted him here on the open prairie,
a hundred and twenty miles from his base of supplies.
It seems that the scout had come across Sitting Bull’s war camp, where
thousands of warriors, drunk with the blood of Custer and the brave men
of the Seventh U. S. Cavalry, were defying the Government in the
inaccessible canyons around the Dry Fork of the Missouri. The camp was
only a day’s journey from us, and the scout and our valiant cook had
concluded that their precious scalps were too valuable to risk.
The Professor asked us whether we could carry on the double work which
their dishonorable conduct had made necessary, and we willingly
undertook to do so, even if it were to mean working our fingers to the
bone.
Isaac took the seat, and we prepared to start on, but misfortunes never
come singly. Our four-year-old colt, who had had a chance to rest during
the delay, suddenly decided that he too would try to put a stop to the
expedition. He balked, and when the Professor went up to him to lead him
along, he struck out viciously with his fore feet.
Now I imagine that the Professor had put up with about all that he was
willing to bear. The cowardly desertion of our men, combined with the
discomforts of our situation,—we had had nothing to eat or drink since
we left Dog Creek, and the only spring on the route at which we could
get good water was miles away,—left little mercy in his heart for this
miserable, obstinate horse. He told Isaac to unhitch the animal and tie
him to a hind wheel, while I got on top of the wagon, armed with a club
to prevent his trying to climb in.
With the whip in one hand, butt end down, Cope approached the horse with
the other outstretched, speaking gently to conciliate him. The horse,
however, struck out with all his might. Narrowly escaping the blow, the
Professor stepped back, raised the whip, and with the butt end, hit the
horse behind the ear. The animal fell like a flash, and lay for some
time stunned; but when he struggled to his feet, and the Professor
approached him again with outstretched hand and soft words, the brute
struck again. Again Cope knocked him down, and, although when he rose to
his feet, he made another feeble attempt to strike, a third knock-down
blow was enough for him. After that he welcomed the Professor’s
advances, accepting with every symptom of pleasure the caresses bestowed
upon him, and when untied, he almost dragged Cope after him in his
anxiety to get to his traces. We had no more trouble with him until a
long rest and plenty of food caused him to forget his punishment, and
made a repetition of it necessary.
It was not until late that night, after fourteen hours of strenuous
labor, that we were able to eat our supper of bacon and hardtack, and
lie down for a few hours’ rest. We slung our food from a tree to get it
out of the reach of any grizzlies which might come straying around in
search of bread crumbs or bacon rinds. We expected any moment to be
rolled out of bed by some prowling paw.
The next day we traveled along through the great level stretches that
skirt the Bad Lands. The prairie was covered with thick bunches of
grass, and often had been rooted up for acres by grizzlies in search of
wild artichokes, a sweet morsel they love. We often saw herds of deer
and elk and antelope.
Part of the time our route lay among the foothills of the Judith River
Mountains to the south of us; and when we emerged again on to the open
plain, we found ourselves in a great amphitheater, a hundred miles
across. To the west the towering ranges of the Rockies rose in silent
grandeur, their sides scarred deeply with canyons, in whose recesses the
white snow gleamed and sparkled in the morning light To the south, east,
and north, the Judith River Mountains, the Little Rockies, Medicine Bow,
Bearpaw, and the Sweet Grass Mountains on the border line of Assiniboia
made up the circle. A glorious scene! And there was exhilaration too in
the thought that ours was the first wagon to roll through these rich
solitudes, given up for ages to the red hunter and his game. These hills
were soon to re-echo with the shriek of the locomotive, and this rich
soil to nourish a thousand souls, but in the days I am recalling, we did
not meet a single human being in all the forty miles of our journey.
That night, after another hard day, we halted at the head of a short and
very steep ravine ending in an open valley between two ridges, whose
lofty precipices abutted on the Missouri twelve hundred feet below.
This valley, Cope told us, was to be our camping ground for some time to
come, as a steamboat snubbing-post was situated here. When I learned
this, I threw out my roll of blankets and started it on its way to camp.
It bounded down the ravine, leaping high in the air from boulder to
boulder, and never stopped until it was caught in a bunch of the cactus
that covered the level plain below.
Everything but the Professor’s trunk was unloaded, and the wagon pulled
to the head of the gulch, where Isaac took charge of the tongue, and the
Professor and I, each tying a picket rope to the hind axle and making a
half-hitch to a convenient sapling, let the wagon slowly down the hill.
When the rope was paid out, Isaac blocked the wheels with stones, and we
advanced for another hitch, continuing in this way until we reached the
bottom. The baggage was then packed down, and, after a space had been
cleared of cactus, our tent was pitched. It was not until long after
midnight that we sat down to cook our meal, and when we rolled into our
blankets we slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.
Not only during this trip, but all through our stay in the Bad Lands, we
were tormented by myriads of black gnats, which got under our hat rims
and shirt sleeves, and produced sores that gave rise to pus and thick
scabs. They got under the saddles and girths too, irritating the horses
almost beyond endurance. We were forced, for lack of something better,
to cover our faces and arms with bacon grease and to rub the skins of
the horses under the collars and saddles with the same disagreeable
substance.
Fossil bones always partake of the characteristics of the rock in which
they are entombed, and here they were quite hard when we got in to where
the rock was compact. The Professor found here the first specimen ever
discovered in America of the wonderful horned dinosaurs; _Monoclonius_
he called the first species. I assisted him in digging out his specimen
of _M. crassus_, a species distinguished by a small horn over each
orbit, and a large one on the nasal bones; and I myself discovered two
species new to science. One of these, an _M. sphenocerus_, was six or
seven feet high at the hips, and, according to Cope, must have been
twenty-five feet long, including the tail. It has a long compressed
nasal horn, and two small horns over the eyes.
Professor Marsh later discovered a similar form in these same fossil
beds, and named it _Ceratops montanus_.
The species I discovered were collected on the north side of the river,
three miles below Cow Island, after the Professor had taken the last
boat down the river. When we uncovered these bones we found them very
brittle, as they had been shattered by the uplift of the strata in which
they were buried; and we were obliged to devise some means of holding
them in place. The only thing we had in camp that could be made into a
paste was rice, which we had brought along for food. We boiled
quantities of it until it became thick, then, dipping into it flour bags
and pieces of cotton cloth and burlap, we used them to strengthen the
bones and hold them together. This was the beginning of a long line of
experiments, which culminated in the recently adopted method of taking
up large fossils by bandaging them with strips of cloth dipped in
plaster of Paris, like the bandages in which a modern surgeon encases a
broken limb.
I feel it a great privilege to have been one of the original discoverers
of these great horned dinosaurs, whose skeletons are now among the chief
glories of our museums.
* * * * *
One day, about the fifteenth of October, Professor Cope, who had been
anxiously awaiting the arrival of the last steamboat, concluded to ride
out on the open prairie to some bad lands which we had seen on our
journey down from Dog Creek. I accompanied him. On the way he fell into
one of his frequent absent-minded moods, picturing the land as it must
have been at the time of the dinosaurs, when the shale of these
black-sided canyons was mud on an ocean floor. So fascinated were we
both by his descriptions that the time flew by unheeded, and it was
afternoon before we reached the prairie south of Cow Island.
Upon arriving at the bit of bad lands, we separated, agreeing to meet at
four o’clock at the place where we left the horses. I kept the
appointment, but the Professor was nowhere to be seen, and as hour after
hour passed with no sign of him, I began to grow anxious. I knew the
foolishness of trying to find him in that network of gorges and ridges,
and could only wait, eagerly watching the outlets of the labyrinth.
Just as the sun was sinking behind the Rockies he came out of a narrow
ravine with the head of a large mountain sheep on his back. He gave it
to me to carry behind my saddle, and with few words we mounted and set
off at full speed for home, remembering the three men whom we had met on
the prairie at noon, who had been lost for three days in the intricate
passages of the Bad Lands. I did not like to think of trying to find the
way there after night.
The Professor dashed over the prairie without once drawing rein,
clearing bunches of cactus ten feet, sometimes, in diameter, at a single
bound; and I followed suit. So, by a series of leaps, we crossed the
ten-mile stretch and drew up at the head of a gorge, from which we could
see Cow Island.
Cope eagerly scanned the lights of the little station, and finally
decided that a new set had been added to those of the soldiers’ tents.
He was sure that the long-expected steamer lay at her snubbing-post, and
declared emphatically that we must reach Cow Island that night.
I knew the uselessness of trying to combat his iron will, but I pleaded
with him against the folly of attempting to thread in the darkness those
black and treacherous defiles, where a single misstep meant certain
death. I begged him to wait until daylight. We were, to be sure, hungry
and thirsty, and food, water, and shelter were to be had only at the
river, but sleeping in our saddle blankets without supper was, I urged,
preferable to running the risk of being dashed to pieces.
He paid no attention to what I said, but dismounting, led his horse into
the canyon. He had to cut a stick to shove in front of him, as his eyes
could not penetrate the darkness a single inch ahead. I cut another to
punch along his horse, which did not want to follow him.
Sometimes when we had climbed down several hundred feet, the end of the
Professor’s stick would encounter only air, and a handful of stones
thrown ahead would be heard to strike the earth far below. Then we had
to turn and climb back through the deep dust to the top, and circling a
canyon, plunge down on the other side.
Once we got down to the river four miles from the prairie, and thought
that our journey was over, as we could see the lights of the station
just across the river. But when we had watered our thirsty horses and
started down for the landing, we found our way blocked by a huge ridge
with a towering precipice impinging on the river; and we had to drag
ourselves back over those four long, hard miles to the prairie, and
start again. I freely confess that I should have been willing to lie
down in the dust just where I was, and let the horses look out for
themselves, but Cope’s indomitable will could not be conquered. Back we
climbed to the top, and down we went into the next ravine.
I have never known another man who would have attempted this journey. It
was both foolhardy and useless, but we could say that we accomplished
what no one else ever had in reaching Cow Island through the Bad Lands
after dark.
For we did reach it. Just before daylight we got down to the landing
across from the station, and sure enough, the steamboat was at her post.
But another disappointment was in store for us. The Professor shouted to
the sergeant to come and take us over, but his voice was not recognized,
and as the sergeant was afraid that the call might come from some Indian
who had prepared an ambush, he refused to respond. We were soaked with
perspiration, and rapidly becoming chilled by a cold fog that was rising
along the shore, and we were obliged to walk back and forth to keep warm
until the Professor had recovered his natural voice.
Then, in his haste to correct his error, the sergeant sent a boat across
in the wrong place, and it was turned over in the rapids. He had to
rescue the half-drowned men, capture the boat, and try again.
At last, however, we were warming ourselves in a tent, where a pot of
beans was simmering for the soldiers’ breakfast. Not a bean was left
when we got through with them, and three pounds of raspberry jam, spread
upon, I was going to say a box of, hardtack, followed the beans. Then
the sergeant took us both out into the open air and turned back the big
black tarpaulin covering the gold ore that was to be shipped to the
smelter at Omaha. He made us a warm nest of new blankets, and when we
had crawled into it, pulled the tarpaulin back into place. Did we sleep?
Ask the deckhands who let the sunlight in upon us about nine o’clock the
next morning, when they pulled away the tarpaulin to load the ore.
Cope at once sought the captain of the boat and said, “I am Professor
Cope, of Philadelphia. I have a four-horse wagon at a steamboat
snubbing-post three miles below. I would like you to stop there on your
way down, and carry my outfit across to this side. My baggage and
freight are also there, and I want to take passage for Omaha.”
“Well, sir,” the man answered, “I am the captain of this boat. If you
want to go down the river, you must have your baggage, freight, and self
at this landing before ten o’clock to-morrow morning, when I leave for
down-river points.”
The Professor did not argue the question further. He tried to get the
loan of an old sand-scow, but the man who owned it had heard this
conversation with the captain, and refused to lend it. The Professor was
obliged to purchase it for an enormous price, and the next day left it
where he got it. We boarded this scow, and leaving our ponies picketed
across the river, paddled down to camp, where, to our disgust, we found
that Mr. Isaac had gone out into the Bad Lands to look for us. There was
no time to lose; so, although stiff and sore from our night’s exertions,
we plunged into the work of lowering the tent, packing our stores and
fossils into the wagon, and dragging everything aboard the scow. We were
ready to start when Mr. Isaac appeared.
We crossed the river, swimming our horses; and then came the time for
old Major to go it alone and show his worth. We converted the Missouri
into a canal, and its northern bank into a towpath. Old Major we hitched
to a line attached to the scow; and while a couple of mountain men whom
we had in camp kept the boat away from the shore with long poles, I rode
the big horse, often right into the river, until he began to sink in a
mud bank, and I had to turn hastily back to shore. The Professor and Mr.
Isaac had the worst places, for they had to keep the rope from being
caught by a snag or rock; and when it did catch, if they did not
instantly loose their hold upon it, the tension threw them far over into
the river, and they had to get out as best they could. This occurred a
number of times.
When about sundown we hove-to under the big steamer, the deck was
crowded with passengers watching our approach. Cope was covered with mud
from head to foot, and his clothing, with hardly a seam whole, hung from
him in wet, dirty rags. He had forgotten to bring along any winter
wearing apparel, so, although the nights were quite cold, and the women
were clad in fur coats and the men in ulsters, he emerged from the
sergeant’s tent, whither he had carried his grip, in a summer suit and
linen duster.
He told me about a funny experience that he had on the boat on the way
down the river. It goes without saying that in that long trip he taught
the passengers more natural science than they had ever learned in all
their lives before. At a certain wood-camp, he and some others went
ashore and found the skull of a Crow Indian. The Crow method of burial
was to wrap the body in a blanket, lay it on the ground, and build
around it an open frame of logs, to keep away wild animals. It was an
easy matter to pick up a skull.
The Professor carried his find aboard in his hands before everyone, and
was beginning to tell his enlightened listeners the special cranial
characteristics of this tribe, when a body of deckhands, headed by their
appointed speaker, came forward and told the captain that they would not
allow Professor Cope to “emulate the dead.” He must take the skull back
to its grave or they would not remain aboard and take the boat down to
Omaha.
“Why,” said the speaker earnestly, “we will be caught on every mud bank
in the river, and there is no telling what calamities will happen, if he
is allowed to emulate the dead.”
There was no getting them to back down from their position, and the
Crow’s skull was restored to its grave. But the Professor said
afterwards, “We had about a dozen skulls packed in with the fossils, and
in spite of them, reached Omaha without having to walk on stilts, as had
been prophesied.”
Shortly after the Professor left us, I discovered a fine specimen, one
of those mentioned earlier in this chapter, three miles below Cow
Island, near the base of a high tableland, where I kept my pony picketed
while I worked. One day, when I prepared to mount him, I noticed that he
was unusually quiet. His custom was to start on a run as soon as my foot
touched the stirrup, leaving me to get into the saddle as best I could.
This time he stood still, and when I reached my seat and lifted the
lines, I found that they were perfectly useless, as the curb was broken.
Before I could dismount, the brute started at a rapid pace across the
tableland toward a sheer precipice, hundreds of feet high. I settled
myself firmly in the saddle and hung on with both hands to the
hand-holds behind, fearing that he might try to hurl me over; and that
was just what he did. When he got within a few inches of the brink, he
planted his feet and stopped suddenly. But Providence and long practice
in riding all kinds of horses enabled me to keep my seat, and
fortunately, the saddle girths held.
I was just about to dismount, when suddenly the determined animal
whirled around and started for the precipice on the other side, where he
went through the same performance. And not satisfied even then, tried
the trick a third time. Then he allowed me to dismount and mend the
curb. In payment for his treachery, I forced him to run at full speed
down the steep and rugged trail to camp.
This chapter has been largely taken up with adventures and a study of
the man Cope; but as a matter of fact, there was little else to tell
about, as we were in such haste that we secured few specimens, and the
most important result of the expedition was our discovery of many new
specimens of dinosaurs, represented chiefly by teeth.
On the first of November a heavy snowstorm set in, promising to leave
the country covered with snow for the winter; so we loaded our outfit
and started for Fort Benton. The sergeant went with us, very
fortunately, as it proved; for one night, as we were camping in the Bear
Paw Mountains, one of our crazy mustang wheelers heard a wolf howl and
started on a run for one of the other horses which was picketed farther
down the slope. Coming suddenly to the end of its rope, its feet
slipped, and it fell and broke its neck. But for the sergeant’s horse we
could not have hauled in our load.
Countless herds of buffalo were being driven to the Bad Lands by the
storm, as were also great droves of deer, elk, and antelope. It seemed
as if it would be impossible to exterminate them. Yet I learned by the
papers the other day that the last herd of buffalo of any size had been
sold at three hundred dollars a head to the Canadian Government, Uncle
Sam being too poor to make the purchase.
We reached Fort Benton in safety, learning later that Sitting Bull had
crossed at Cow Island and killed the soldiers who had been left there. I
never saw my associate, Mr. Isaac, again, but I know that he discovered
some fine material the next year.
I made the return stage journey of six hundred miles in six days.
Through the mountains the thermometer averaged twenty below zero, and I
ate four hearty meals a day. I recrossed the Great Divide on the Union
Pacific Railroad, made a brief visit home, and went on to spend the
winter with Professor Cope.
CHAPTER IV
FURTHER WORK IN THE KANSAS CHALK, 1877
I spent the winter of 1876–77 with Professor Cope, first at Haddonfield,
then at his new home on Pine Street, in Philadelphia.
At Haddonfield the commodious loft of a large, old-fashioned barn was
fitted up as a workshop, and I had also a bed here. I boarded with a Mr.
Geismar, Professor Cope’s preparator, but I had a standing invitation to
eat dinner every Sunday with the Professor and his wife and daughter, a
lovely child of twelve summers.
I shall never forget those Sunday dinners. The food was plain, but
daintily cooked, and the Professor’s conversation was a feast in itself.
He had a wonderful power of putting professional matters from his mind
when he left his study, and coming out ready to enter into any kind of
merrymaking. He used to sit with sparkling eyes, telling story after
story, while we laughed at his sallies until we could laugh no more.
I never knew his wit to fail him. I remember being present at a meeting
of the Academy of Science, in Philadelphia, at which he was up for
re-election to the office of recording secretary, and was defeated.
Among others, Professor William Moore Gabb made some remarks against
him. Cope’s only defense was “Now, William, more gab!”
I attended also the dinners which he gave to his hosts of friends in the
city, and the luncheons at which Mrs. Cope entertained the young men to
whom the Professor gave lectures in his own home. He told his funniest
anecdotes on these occasions, and used to call on me for my story of the
old farmer who, while at work hoeing corn in a stump-field on the side
of a hill, saw a hoop-snake at the top take its tail in its mouth and
begin to roll down towards him. Springing behind a stump, he struck at
it with his hoe handle, into which the sting at the end of the snake’s
tail entered deeply. In less than an hour the handle had swelled up to
the size of a man’s leg.
I believe that this story-telling of which he was so fond was for Cope a
form of relaxation from his heavy work in the study, and that his
ability to give himself up so thoroughly to it in his leisure hours was
what enabled him to accomplish in his life an amount of work such as few
men have ever accomplished. It would take a volume even to name the
titles of all the products of his industrious brain. One of them alone,
the great Volume III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata,” often called “Cope’s
Bible,” has over a thousand pages of text, beside many fine plates. It
was published by the Government, in 1884.
Before starting back to outfit another expedition to the Kansas Chalk, I
secured the services of Mr. Russell T. Hill, an able young man who was
working in the Academy under the Jesup Fund; and upon our arrival at
Manhattan, I hired Mr. A. W. Brouse as teamster and cook.
About the last of March we started with a team of ponies and a light
spring wagon upon our long and extremely tedious journey across the
state of Kansas, to our headquarters at Buffalo Park. At Chapman Creek,
a few miles from Junction City, we were stopped by high water. A raging
torrent twenty feet deep filled the bed of the creek; neither man nor
beast could have crossed it alive. We were, therefore, horrified to see
a farmer, sitting on a seat on top of two sets of side-boards in a
lumber wagon, come driving down into this fearful flood. I called to him
to stop, and asked him what he was going to do.
“I must come over,” he shouted.
“Why,” I answered, “the water is twenty feet deep, and running like a
mill race. You’ll be swept away.”
“But I have not had my mail for a week. I must come over,” he shouted
back.
“Well,” said I, “you big fool, why don’t you go down to the railroad
bridge, just below here, and walk over?”
“By Chimmeny,” he said, “I hadn’t thought of that!”
As we were now in the antelope country, we were rarely out of antelope
meat. One morning we saw a buck antelope standing close to the railroad
track, watching an incoming train. I remarked, as I urged the driver to
hurry up his horses, that perhaps someone would shoot the animal from
the train. And sure enough, as the train passed, a window flew up, and a
man with a revolver shot the buck through the neck. It began to describe
a circle, its feet planted together, and springing from the wagon, I cut
its throat with a butcher knife, while the boys held its horns.
Another time, as we were traveling along over the prairie, we suddenly
came upon a young antelope hidden securely in the center of a bunch of
grass. We should not have seen him at all from the ground, but being
above him on the wagon seat, we looked right down on him. The boys
jumped out, and approaching the little chap carefully, were just
spreading out their arms so as to be ready to grab him, when he sprang
to his feet so quickly that their hands were thrown into the air, and
darted off. The boys started after him at the top of their speed, but
they might as well have tried to catch a streak of lightning.
One day we were camping at the spring on Hackberry, south of Buffalo,
when a couple of men rode up to us. They said that they were cowmen, and
that they had lost their outfit. I invited them into my tent, and after
supper gave them the boys’ bed, the boys themselves climbing into the
covered wagon.
Early in the morning one of the men wakened me and asked for a revolver.
There was an antelope in camp, he said. I handed him a Smith and Wesson,
and peeped out, to see a fine buck standing just at the end of the wagon
tongue, looking over the tent and wagon. The stranger opened fire at
three or four paces and emptied the revolver. Then throwing it down as
of no account, he asked for a gun. I gave him a Sharp’s rifle and a
cartridge belt. In the meanwhile the antelope had walked a few yards
away and turned to look at us. The man fired several shots, and threw
down the rifle also, and as the boys were by this time climbing out of
the wagon, one with a Winchester, the other with a little Ballard, he
borrowed from them first one firearm and then the other, and blazed away
without once drawing blood. Finally the buck deliberately moved over the
hill and out of sight, while the man swore that it had a charmed life.
We thought otherwise, however, and the boys followed it; soon returning
with it swinging from a gun, which they carried on their shoulders like
a pole.
I recall another ludicrous incident connected with this expedition. We
happened to be at Buffalo Station once when Professor Snow, the
much-loved Kansas naturalist, and at one time the chancellor of the
State University, was in town with a large party of students, on his
annual insect hunt.
The old Chisholm cattle trail led through Buffalo, and one day the owner
of a large herd of Texas cattle, who was passing through, noticed
Professor Snow and his party out on the prairie with their nets in their
hands, running about as if possessed. It happened to be the first time
that he had ever seen insect collectors at work, and his curiosity was
aroused.
“What are those men doing?” he asked Jim Thompson, the storekeeper.
“Catching bugs,” was the laconic reply.
“I don’t believe it,” said the cowman. “They are grown men.”
“All right,” said Jim, “you can find out for yourself if you want to.”
The man started off after the Professor, and I waited, with a good deal
of curiosity, to hear his report of the conversation. On his return he
was in a brown study. The Professor had taken him into his tent, and
shown him hundreds of mounted insects, reeling off their names to him
until his head whirled.
“Well, did I tell you the truth?” Jim asked.
“That man,” said the cowman, “is the smartest man I ever saw. He knows
the names and surnames of all the bugs in this country.”
On the thirtieth of April we drove down to the Smoky, thirty miles south
of Buffalo, and got caught in a quicksand, but managed to save both team
and wagon. We camped at the mouth of a large ravine with plenty of grass
in it.
All that night it blew a perfect gale. Did you, dear reader, ever try to
sleep in a tent when the wind was high and the canvas flapped about you,
waking the fear that at any moment the pegs might pull out or a seam
part? Do you know what it is to lie, deafened by thunder and blinded by
lightning, while the rain and sleet dash against the thin covering which
is all that separates you from the fury of the storm? It is not a
pleasant experience, and yet in all the years that I have gone camping,
although I have expected time and again to find my tent torn to shreds
over my head, my fears have never once been realized. Even in the most
terrible storms my tent has stood securely, and I have escaped without
serious inconvenience.
On this trip, however, we did have a disagreeable experience. A cold
rain continued for four days, and the tent sprang a leak right over my
bed. Moreover, the buffalo chips were so wet that we could not build a
fire, and had to eat cold food and sleep in wet blankets.
Among the difficulties with which we had to contend on this expedition
was a defective wagon wheel. One day, as we were driving along a slope,
our lower wheel dished out, and dumped us, load and all, to the ground.
Upon examination, we found that the maker had used a hub whose mortises
were too large for the spokes. The latter had been held in place by
wedges which had been painted over so that they should not be detected.
The man who sold us the wagon had guaranteed it for a year, but
unfortunately, he lived two hundred miles away. When the necessity
arises, however, one can solve any problem somehow; so we took off the
tire, put back the spokes and wedges, heated the tire in a fire of
buffalo chips, and reset it. We tried to drive carefully after this and
avoid sloping places, but it generally happened that when we least
expected it, we would fall by the wayside. Most aggravating of all, when
we did take the defective wheel back to the man who guaranteed it, he
gave us another even more unreliable than the first. It is a mystery to
me how manufacturers can play such miserable tricks on their customers.
We were much inconvenienced also by the illness of one of our horses. He
often gave out on the open prairie, in one case, I remember, three miles
from water. The only vessel we had in which to bring it to camp was a
gallon jug, and it kept one person busy getting enough for our use. We
were finally obliged to get another horse in place of the sick one; and
our bad luck persisting, hit upon one which had evidently been trained
to the wheel of a coach, for as soon as the last trace had been hitched,
he was off like a shot. Fortunately, his mate could not run as fast, so
that they simply went round in a circle, and the boys, watching their
chance, caught hold of the wagon and got aboard.
This horse was continually giving us trouble. One day when we were about
to cross Hackberry Creek I went ahead with my pick and struck the dry,
cracked clay of the bed, to see whether it would hold. As I could not
break through, I concluded that we could cross safely, and beckoned to
Will Brouse to come on. Whereupon that miserable mustang, taking his bit
between his teeth, came down the hill with the load at full speed, and,
dashing onto the hardened clay, broke through into the thick mortar
below.
The boys, jumping out, managed to get both horses unhitched before they
went down, and quickly hitched them to the hind axle of the wagon, to
save the load of fossils which we were hauling to the station. Then
began a performance of that tantalizing trick which horses know so well
how to play. Rowdy would make a rush forward, as if he intended to haul
out the load in a hurry, but the moment he felt the collar press his
neck, he would fall back against the wheel, while his mate went through
the same performance. So they see-sawed up and down, until I could stand
it no longer, as the wagon was slowly sinking. I took the lines, and
putting all my will-power into the command “Get out of this!” I forced
them to pull together and haul the wagon out to solid ground. Then when
we unhitched them, they ran away and scattered singletrees, nuts, and
bolts all over the prairie.
South of the river we found some fine examples of large _Haploscapha_
shells, some of them a foot in diameter. The valves of this shell are
shaped a little like a woman’s bonnet, and the name Conrad gave it,
“_Haploscapha grandis_,” may be freely translated “The great hood.”
(Fig. 17.)
[Illustration:
FIG. 17.—FOSSIL SHELLS, _Haploscapha grandis_.
(After Cope.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 18.—CHARLES STERNBERG AND SON TAKING UP A LARGE SLAB OF FOSSILS
FROM A CHALK BED IN GOVE CO., KANSAS.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 19.—CAMP AND WAGON OF THE FOSSIL HUNTERS ON GRASSWOOD CREEK,
CONVERSE CO., WYOMING.
]
We found many fish and saurians or mosasaurs also. Very different was
our method of collecting them then from what it is now, for fossil
hunting is as capable of improvement as any other form of human
endeavor. Then we went over, in a few months, all the chalk in western
Kansas, which lines the ravines on either side of the Smoky Hill and its
branches for a hundred miles; now it takes us five years to get over the
same ground. Then we dug up the bones with a butcher knife or pick, and
packed in flour sacks with dry buffalo grass, which we pulled with our
fingers. Some strange animals were created by Cope and Marsh in those
early days, when they attempted to restore a creature from the few
disconnected bones thus carelessly collected. Now we take up great slabs
of the chalk, so that we can show the bones _in situ_, that is, in their
original matrix, so that they may be the more easily fitted together in
their natural relations with each other.
When, after much careful exploration, we find, sticking out of the edge
of a canyon or wash, the bones of some “ancient mariner” of the old
Cretaceous ocean, we first lay bare a floor above the bones by picking
away the rock. Then I, usually stretched at full length on this floor,
with a crooked awl and a brush, uncover the bones enough to be able to
determine how they lie, often keeping up the tedious work for hours.
When the position of each bone has been ascertained, my son George, who
for years has been my chief assistant, and I cut trenches around the
specimen, and, hewing down the outside rock two or three inches, make a
frame of 2 × 4 lumber, cover the bones with oiled paper, and fill the
frame with plaster. As the fossil rarely lies level, it is necessary to
have the cover ready to nail on, a board at a time, while the plaster is
being poured in. This results in a panel of even thickness, with every
bone in or near its original position, or at least in the position in
which it was buried.
After the plaster has hardened comes the difficult labor of digging the
rock away from underneath. One has to lie on one’s left side and work
with a light pick, using great care, so as to cut away the rock just
enough to allow the frame to come down by its own weight. If force is
used very likely the rock, with its enclosed fossil, will be torn from
the frame, and the specimen ruined. Afterwards the rock is leveled off
even with the frame, and the bottom nailed on. The case is then placed
in a larger box with excelsior carefully packed around it.
The illustration (Fig. 18) shows a huge panel in process of being cut
out. George and I spent two weeks of heavy labor upon another. Luckily,
it was preserved in chalk hard enough to allow of its being lifted
without breaking. The slab was about four inches thick, and weighed at
least six hundred pounds, yet he and I handled it entirely alone,
getting it boxed and into the wagon ourselves.
My old friend, Dr. S. W. Williston, who in the seventies was in charge
of collecting parties for Professor Marsh, and is now a noted authority
in paleontology and professor of that science in the University of
Chicago, describes this specimen in his great work on North American
plesiosaurs, a Field Columbian Museum publication. He says: “The
specimen of _Dolichorhynchops osborni_, herewith described and
illustrated [Fig. 20], was discovered by Mr. George Sternberg, in the
summer of 1900, and skilfully collected by his father, the veteran
collector of fossil vertebrates. The specimen was purchased of Mr.
Sternberg in the following spring for the University of Kansas, where it
has been mounted and now is. When received at the museum, the skeleton
was almost wholly contained in a large slab of soft, yellow chalk, with
all its bones disassociated, and more or less entangled together. The
left ischium, lying by the side of the maxilla, was protruding from the
surface, and part of it was lost. The bones of the tail and some of the
smaller podial bones were removed a distance from the rest of the
skeleton, and were collected separately by Mr. Sternberg. The head was
lying partly upon its left side, and some of the bones of the right side
had been macerated away. The maxilla indeed had disappeared.
“The task of removing and mounting the bones has required the labor of
Mr. H. T. Martin the larger part of a year, and is as finally mounted,
an example of great labor and skill on his part.... The skeleton, as
mounted, is just ten feet in length. The neck in life must have been
thick and heavy at the base. The trunk was broad; the abdominal region
short between the girdles; the short tail was thick at its base. The
species was named in honor of Professor H. F. Osborn, of Columbia
University.”
In his introduction Dr. Williston speaks of the great scientific value
of this specimen of the plesiosaurian family, of which he says:
“Thirty-two species and fifteen genera have been described from the
United States, and in not a single instance has there been even a
considerable part of the skeleton made known.”
I am glad that the University of Kansas owns this splendid denizen of
her ancient Cretaceous sea.
My collection in the Royal Museum of Munich is said by Dr. H. F. Osborn
to be the finest prepared collection of Kansas Chalk and Texas Permian
vertebrates in the world. A recent letter from my friend Dr. Broili, an
assistant there, says that the collection contains over eighty-five
distinct species of extinct vertebrates. Among these, there are eighteen
species and seven genera new to science. Seven papers have been
published describing this material, by J. C. Merriam, A. R. Crook,
Charles R. Eastman, F. B. Loomis, F. Broili, L. Neumayer, and L.
Strickler, respectively; and it has been illustrated by forty plates.
The lamented German paleontologist, Dr. Carl von Zittel, under whom I
served the Munich museum for several years, wrote me that I had erected
here “an immemorial monument” to my name.
Here rests, far from its native shores, the most complete skeleton of
the Cretaceous shark, _Oxyrhina mantelli_ Agassiz, ever discovered in
any formation. It formed the basis for the inaugural address delivered
by Charles R. Eastman before the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.
I discovered this specimen while conducting an expedition for Dr. von
Zittel. I was entirely alone, and camping on one of the ravines that
score the southern slope of the Smoky Hill valley, south of Buffalo
Park. I had already found a number of flattened disks, the centra of
fish vertebræ, which Dr. Williston had assured me belonged to a species
of shark, as he had found teeth associated with them. I was delighted,
therefore, to find here a continuous string of them leading into a low
knoll. I quickly shoveled away the loose chalk and cleaned up the floor,
to find the whole column, nearly twenty in length; while the skull was
represented by great plates of cartilaginous bone, containing some two
hundred and fifty teeth from the roof and floor of the mouth. The larger
teeth were over an inch long and covered with a shining, dark-colored
enamel. They were as sharp and polished as in life, and lay in or near
their natural positions.
This is the first time and, I believe, the only time that so complete a
specimen of this ancient shark has been discovered. The column and other
solid parts were composed of cartilaginous matter which usually decays
so easily that it is rarely petrified. I suppose my specimen was old at
the time of its death, and bony matter had been deposited in the
cartilage. It is not very likely that such a specimen will ever be
duplicated. Dr. Eastman’s study of this skeleton enabled him to make
synonyms of many species which had been named from teeth alone.
Among the most valuable of my further discoveries in the Kansas chalk
beds was that of two nearly complete skeletons of that great sea
tortoise, _Protostega gigas_ Cope. The type had already been described
by Professor Cope from a number of disconnected bones which he found
near Fort Wallace in 1871.
[Illustration:
FIG. 20.—SKELETON OF THE PLESIOSAUR, _Dolichorhynchus osborni_.
Discovered by George F. Sternberg and collected by Charles Sternberg.
After Williston. (Now in the Kansas State University.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 21.—FOSSIL LIMB BONES OF THE GIANT SEA TORTOISE, _Protostega
gigas_.
Collected by Charles Sternberg.
]
In 1903 I was so fortunate as to find a practically complete skeleton of
_Protostega gigas_ in normal condition, that is, with the bones all in
or near their original positions. The late Dr. J. B. Hatcher, whose
death in the very noonday of his glorious career as a fossil hunter cast
a gloom over the world of paleontology, purchased this specimen from me
for the Carnegie Museum. It has been described in the Memoirs of the
Carnegie Museum by Dr. G. R. Wieland, the authority on extinct turtles,
under the title “The Osteology of _Protostega_.” He says, on page 289:
“The third of a century which elapsed since Cope’s discovery of
_Protostega gigas_, has not sufficed to bring forth a complete
restoration of any single individual of these great sea-turtles. How
welcome then has been the discovery during the last two years by Mr.
Charles Sternberg in the Niobrara Cretaceous of western Kansas, of the
nearly complete specimens of _Protostega gigas_ which permit the present
description of the organization of the limbs, the most important of the
parts yet undescribed as well as the very least likely to be recovered
in complete form.” (Fig. 21.)
This rare fossil was briefly mentioned by Professor Osborn also in
_Science_ as a “complete skeleton of _Protostega_ which lay on its
dorsal surface with fore limbs stretched out at right angles to the
median line of the carapace, measuring six feet between the ungual
phalanges.”
A second specimen, which I discovered and sold directly to Dr. W. J.
Holland, the director of the Carnegie Museum, is thus described by Dr.
Wieland on page 282 of the Memoirs, under the heading “Specimen No.
1421, Carnegie Museum Catalogue of Vertebrates”:
“This fine fossil is from the Niobrara Cretaceous of Hackberry Creek.”
(I should like to correct this mistake. It was found about three miles
northwest of Monument Rocks in a ravine that empties into the Smoky,
east of where Elkader once stood.) “The _ex situ_ portions of the
original skeleton, which had weathered out and are secured in more or
less complete condition, include the left humerus, radius, ulna, etc.
The _in situ_ portion consists of the right anterior part of the
skeleton, and was secured on a single slab of matrix, in which it still
remains intact, as shown in the accompanying drawing by Mr. Prentice,
including the lower jaw in oblique inferior view, the skull, the
T-shaped nuchal (plate) and two marginals. It will be seen what
exceedingly satisfactory information is furnished by the present
specimen as compared with all other examples of _Protostega_ hitherto
found. Specimen 1420 [my first specimen] is more complete than any other
at present discovered. As originally embedded in its matrix of chalk,
nearly every element was present in an exactly or approximately natural
position. Unfortunately, the collector of this surprisingly complete
fossil, in an attempt to remove and separate the bones from their
original matrix of chalk, mismarked some of them, and also made it
impossible to either replace more than a few of the marginal elements,
or to determine the outlines of any of the plastral elements. Such work
is difficult enough in well-equipped laboratories. However, none of the
bones of the limbs are broken, and Mr. Sternberg redeemed himself by
discovering and securing in such excellent condition No. 1421, as just
related.”
I learn from one of the Museum’s staff that this specimen is to be
mounted this summer of 1908, and placed on exhibition. As long as the
Carnegie Museum stands, this splendid example of the great sea-tortoise
will be admired by lovers of nature. In shape it is very like the
present-day turtle of the Mediterranean. Its huge front paddles, with a
span of ten feet, were armed with horrid claws. The hind ones were
stretched out parallel with the body and used as sculls by this “boatman
of the Cretaceous.”
An account of my work in the Kansas Chalk would not be complete without
some mention of my discovery, in several small localities, of the
crinoid _Uintacrinus socialis_ Grinell. According to Mr. Frank Springer,
our noted American authority on this subject, only seven localities were
known in 1901; he did not know of my discoveries. I can bear witness
with him, though, to the rarity of this species. During the fifteen
years in which I have gone over the chalk exposures again and again, I
can remember only three localities of these fossils, the Martin
locality, another three miles to the east of it, and a third on Butte
Creek near Elkader. The first has yielded the finest specimens among
those which were described by Mr. Springer in his magnificent treatise
on _Uintacrinus_, published by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard University.
Last year, however, my son George found two splendid specimens about
fifty feet apart, further east than they had been discovered before. The
locality is south of Quinter, in the southern part of Gove County,
thirty-seven miles east of the Martin locality. These two colonies each
contained about forty calices. As usual, they are flattened out on the
under side of a calcareous slab about a quarter of an inch thick and
beveled off as thin as paper at the margins. One slab was sent to the
Senckenberg Museum in Germany, while Mr. Springer secured the other.
The calyx, or as we have called it, “the head,” has ten long arms, some
of them about thirty inches long.[1]
Footnote 1:
A restoration of the _Uintacrinus_ is shown in the same illustration
(Fig. 11_a_) in which the _Clidastes_ is represented.
These beautiful globular animals were stemless, and evidently lived in
swarms, as single specimens are never found. According to Mr. Springer,
when death overtook one of these swarms, it fell to the bottom, where
the first individuals were buried in the soft mud and preserved, while
the others, not being so protected, disintegrated. The limy plates of
the calices and those of the arms, which were thus mingled together
above the perfect specimens, became compressed into a hard slab, in the
bottom of which the perfect specimens are firmly impressed.
Great numbers of these creatures have been discovered in the English
chalk, but they consist only of the disintegrated plates.
CHAPTER V
DISCOVERY OF THE LOUP FORK BEDS OF KANSAS AND SUBSEQUENT WORK THERE,
1877 AND 1882–84
About the first of July, 1877, I received orders to go north to the Loup
Fork River in Nebraska to search for vertebrate fossils in beds of the
Upper Miocene, called by Hayden the Loup Fork Group. I happened to meet,
however, an old line hunter, Abernathy by name, who had brought into
Buffalo his last load of buffalo hides, and he told me that a little
above his cabin, on the middle branch of Sappa Creek in Decatur County,
there was the skull of a mastodon, sticking out of the solid rock.
As a visit to his house would not take me far out of my way, I followed
his lead; and thanks to the observation of this old hunter, who was
scalped in front of his door the next year by a band of hostile Kiowas,
I had the privilege of discovering the rich fossil beds of the Loup Fork
Group in northwestern Kansas, and found enough to do without crossing
into Nebraska.
The whole country north of Buffalo was without human habitation until we
reached the old man’s cabin. On our way there, as we were driving one
sultry day down the long slope to the south branch of the Soloman, we
chanced to look behind us, and as high as the eye could reach, the air
was as black as midnight with flying dust, dry grass, and buffalo chips.
Experience had taught us what all this meant. Will Brouse laid the whip
to the ponies, but they did not need it. They, too, had taken fright,
and tore down the hill at breakneck speed. On reaching the valley, we
came upon a perpendicular bluff, over twenty feet high, impinging on the
level flat, and Will swung the horses under its protecting shelter. We
sprang out, and while one of us unhitched and tied the horses, the rest
caught hold of the wagon and held it down. In an instant all was dark,
while the rush of a mighty wind swept over us with a terrible roar and
passed on, leaving a calm in its wake. As we followed its trail along
the river, we found large trees twisted off at the stump or broken to
pieces, their branches scattered like straws.
About sundown one evening, the old man pointed out, in a side draw of
the middle fork of the Sappa, his mastodon. I sprang from the wagon,
shouting, “It’s a monster turtle!” And so it proved to be, a great land
turtle, over thirty inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, and fifteen
inches high; _Testudo orthopygia_ Cope called it. The back of the
carapace was sticking out of a ledge of grey sandstone. We applied our
picks, and soon had the specimen collected. (Fig. 22.)
Now began an extremely interesting search for this new fauna in Kansas.
The rocks in this part of the state usually consist of gray sand
cemented together with washed chalk and soluble silica. The foundation
on which these beds were deposited is the Niobrara Group of the
Cretaceous. The river beds were cut in this soft lime, and later on the
wash of the land mingled the whiting with the sand and gravel which the
streams brought down from the mountains. The tops of the hills are
capped with this conglomerate gray sandstone in ledges many feet in
thickness, and as the materials composing it easily disintegrate, great
masses of it lie at the bases of the cliffs, resembling old mortar. I
called them mortar beds, and the stratigraphers have adopted the name.
Indeed, they are mortar beds not only in name, from a fancied
resemblance to mortar, but in fact, as all the early settlers can
testify. It was no trouble for them to find beds so soft that the
material could easily be dug out, and when mixed with water and spread
with trowels over the inside walls of a sod house, it made a very
comfortable home. When it comes to comfort, the settlers of the
short-grass country have gained nothing by building frame instead of sod
houses. The early settler’s sod house was cool in summer and warm in
winter, and those who live in more modern houses in order to keep up
with the times will even now speak with regret of the change.
[Illustration:
FIG. 22.—FOSSIL SHELL OF GIANT LAND TURTLE, _Testudo orthopygia_.
Discovered by Charles Sternberg in Phillips Co., Kansas.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 23.—THE SNAKE-NECKED ELASMOSAURUS, _Elasmosaurus platyurus_.
Discovered in the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous. Restoration by
Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of Natural
History.)
]
Not only did I secure a number of specimens of these great turtles, so
abundant at this time, but also large quantities of the remains of a
rhinoceros. Cope thought it hornless, and named it _Aphelops megalodus_,
but since then Hatcher has found that the male bore a loose horn on the
end of the nasal bones.
I also got specimens of the great inferior tusked mastodon, _Trilophodon
campester_ Cope. This remarkably primitive mastodon had a lower jaw that
projected beyond the molar teeth for two feet in a straight line, with a
socket on either side, containing two powerful tusks that terminated in
chisel points. One specimen, which I discovered in 1882 for the Museum
of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, had a jaw four feet long, including
the tusks, which extended eighteen inches beyond the end of the jaw.
A set of jaws was brought me by my son last fall. It belongs to a new
form of this gigantic pachyderm, which, during the Loup Fork times,
inhabited northwestern Kansas and a vast territory west and northwest as
far as the John Day basin in eastern Oregon. A remarkable peculiarity of
this specimen is that the symphysis is greatly elongated and curves
downward thirteen inches below the level of the alveolus, which bears
the great molar teeth. This individual was an old animal, as he had shed
his first dentition and all the premolars and molars of the second
except the very last, those which we call wisdom teeth. Even these are
well worn; so the days of the mastodon’s life must have been numbered
even if he had escaped his enemy, the great saber-toothed tiger, which
preyed on him and the other herbivorous animals of the day.
The length of these remarkable jaws is four feet and one inch. The
height at the condyle, where they connect with the skull, is thirteen
and a half inches; length of molar, nine and a quarter inches; height of
crown, two and one-half inches; distance between the two molars, four
inches. The sockets for the great inferior tusks are two feet long and
six inches in diameter, and the huge recurved tusks themselves must have
been over four feet long. Only a sight of these peculiar jaws, with
tusks above and below, can give the reader an idea of the formidable
appearance of this early mastodon. By the large size and downward
curvature of the lower tusks, this mastodon suggests the great
_Dinotherium_ of the Lower Pliocene of Europe. I regret for America’s
sake, but I am glad for the sake of the world, that these jaws of the
largest mammal ever found in Kansas will find their last resting-place
in the great British Museum, where many of my finest discoveries have
gone.
Another splendid set of lower jaws I found in 1905 in the Sternberg
Quarry, of which I shall speak later, for the Royal Museum of Munich,
Bavaria. Part of the symphysis was broken off, as were also the inferior
tusks. The length of the jaw as preserved is two feet, six inches and a
half, and the height of the condyle, fourteen inches. In the center of
the grinding surface, the height is nine and a half inches. The length
of the molar is about seven and a half inches, and the width three and a
half. This is Professor Cope’s _Trilophodon_.
We found near this mastodon many chisel-like tusks that had fallen out
of their respective jaws and lay scattered with the other bones. By
comparing this specimen with the new species, it will be noticed that
there is quite a difference in size, though evidently they were about
the same age, as in both cases all the teeth have been discarded except
the last molars.
The teeth of these animals were kept sharp by the sand that adhered to
the roots on which they lived. Falling into the pits and valleys between
the crests of enamel, it scoured away the dentine and cementum, and kept
the great grinders ever sharp and ready for use. It is a distinguishing
characteristic of these early mastodons that their tusks have a strip of
enamel along the inside, while the modern elephants’ tusks have only a
vestige of enamel at the extreme tip that is quickly worn off.
Another remarkable inhabitant of Kansas during the Loup Fork Period was
the three-toed horse, an animal but little larger than the new-born colt
of an ordinary farm horse, which evidently lived in herds, judging from
the great quantity of loose teeth that we have found. Its toes were
spreading, which enabled it to walk over bogs and mossy quagmires on the
shores of lakes or rivers, and thus escape the fangs of bloodthirsty
tigers by venturing farther out on the soft ground than they dared to
follow.
In 1882, while employed by the Agassiz Museum, I found the famous
Sternberg Quarry at Long Island on Prairie Dog Creek in Phillips County.
I had been exploring for weeks the region at the head of the branches of
Deer Creek, which spread out in the divide like a fan; but although once
in a while, especially in the neighborhood of Bread Bowl Mound, I had
found fragments of the bones of Loup Fork animals in the sod, I had not
met with much success, as the rocks here disintegrate so easily and hold
moisture so readily that the whole country is covered with grass. There
are thirty-three streams in this county as a result of the immense
amount of moisture which accumulates in these sandstone beds and is
carried to the surface in springs.
One very hot day I started to cross the divide to Prairie Dog Creek. I
had the wagon sheet stretched over the bows, the sides lifted to admit
the breeze, and sleepy with the heat, I let the horses go on about as
they pleased; not noticing, until the level rays of the sun warned me
that it was time to camp, that I had gone farther east than I had
intended. I had my camp outfit with me, however, and as I saw a bunch of
trees in a ravine a mile from the creek I knew that there must be water
there. So the three requisites, grass, wood, and water, were at hand.
After pitching the tent, and starting supper, I found to my delight a
large exposure of hard siliceous rock, consisting of sand and chalk held
firmly together by soluble sand, which proved to be the bottom ledge of
a deposit of gray sandstone. I soon found above it a mastodon’s bones.
My joy knew no bounds, however, when following the narrow draw up to its
head, I found that it cut through a quarry of rhinoceros bones, which
were sticking out of the sand on either side, while the narrow ditch at
the bottom was filled with toe bones, complete or in fragments, and
broken skulls and teeth without number. I have collected fossil
vertebrates and plants since I was seventeen years old, but this is the
greatest deposit of fossils that I have ever discovered.
I shall never forget how, carried away with enthusiasm, I took
possession in the name of Science of the largest bone bed in Kansas. I
did not stop to ask whether anyone else had any interest in the land,
nor did I think it necessary. I had grown so used in my own case to
putting aside every other consideration for the sake of the advancement
of science that it did not occur to me that anyone else might take a
different view. But one day, as I was working in the ravine, an old man,
plowing corn, drove up to its eastern edge. When he made the turn, he
chanced to look across and saw me, pick in hand, diligently uncovering
the skull of a rhinoceros from the sandbank on the other side. He
instantly shouted with all the strength of his lungs, “What are you
doing?”
“Digging up antediluvian relics,” I shouted back. We both shouted as if
we were a hundred yards apart.
“Well,” he called, “get out of there!”
“All right,” I answered in the same loud tones, and kept on working.
The old man, whose name I learned later was Mr. Overton, disappeared,
and I heard no more of him until I went into Long Island for food, or
grub as they say in the West, and was told that he had come in to a
justice of the peace and asked for a warrant to arrest me for collecting
these old bones. He never again came directly to me, either that year or
the following, but people told me that he went around to all the
justices in that part of the country, trying to get his warrant.
Finally, however, they managed to convince him that I was not harming
him, and was benefiting science.
Two years later, in 1884, I was employed by the late Professor Marsh to
explore this same fossil bed. The bones which I was after now were
covered by fourteen feet of moulding sand and a four-foot ledge of hard
rock, the heavier bones lying on the sandstone, the lighter ones mingled
with the sand above. This sand and rock had to be removed by pick and
scraper, which meant that there was a large amount of heavy labor before
us. Therefore, having more means at my command than I had had before, I
drove up to Mr. Overton’s door and offered him forty dollars a month to
work for us with his team during the whole summer, with the
understanding that I was to have all the fossils found. This offer he
gladly accepted, and I found him a very careful worker. Not only did he
do the rough work well, but when we got a floor laid bare above the
bones, he proved to be a most careful collector. My other assistant on
this expedition was a Mr. Will Russ, who afterwards became a skilful
dentist.
Our method of work was first to cut down and remove the sand and rock
for a space twenty feet wide and perhaps a hundred long, using a plow
and scraper. Then we cleaned up our floor and uncovered the bones with
oyster knives and other tools which we had made to suit our purpose.
One, I remember, was a hoe straightened out at the shank and cut off at
the corners to make a diamond-shaped tool. With this we could work under
the high bank, and take out specimens which we could not reach
otherwise. Trowels and diggers of various patterns were used also.
The bones which we were collecting lay scattered along both sides of the
ravine for a quarter of a mile, often in pockets or pot-holes in the
gray sandstone. Of this there are two layers, about fourteen feet apart,
the interspace being filled with beds of fine moulding sand, with some
whiting from the underlying chalk, which constituted the land surface
when these fresh-water beds were deposited. There are also beds of sand
that have been washed clean by the currents of the flood-plain of some
ancient river, for the exposed section shows all the different deposits
of an overflowed valley. Above the washed sand is a stratum of sand and
clay, indicating that here was a quiet place where the muddy backwater
deposited its load. This layer, upon exposure, cracks in all directions,
like the mud at the bottom of a puddle after the water has evaporated.
It has always been a problem to account for the number of the animals
represented here, and for the fact that the bones are so scattered. All
parts of the skeletons are mingled in the greatest confusion, with no
two bones in a natural position. One is, of course, forced, after an
observation of this country, to agree with Drs. Matthew and Hatcher that
these bones were deposited in the flood-plain of a running stream and
not in great lakes, as was believed by older geologists. But the only
supposition upon which I can account for the intermingling of all the
bones of the skeletons on the bottom sandstone layer is that the fine
sand through which the bones were distributed, becoming saturated with
water, was converted into a quicksand, in which the bones sank until
they reached the impenetrable layer below; the heavier bones of course
being at the bottom.
What caused the death of the countless individuals in the Sternberg
Quarry, is a question not easily answered. The authorities quoted above
believe that during the Upper Miocene Period, there were many
water-courses separated, by slightly elevated divides and broad
flood-plains, with possibly here and there small lakes, where the dense
vegetation had clogged some sluggish stream. But during a rainy season
of unusual duration, the whole region for many miles must have been
converted into a series of lakes; and all the animals in the vicinity,
after having gathered at the highest points they could find to escape
death, must have been finally overwhelmed by some great flood that
covered every inch of ground. Then after maceration took place, the
bones might have been scattered by other floods.
A theory of my own, equally plausible, is that the animals were buried
beneath a sandstorm, which tore loose the fine sand of the flood-plain,
and scattered it in suffocating volumes over the frightened multitudes
which had herded together in search of safety or courage.
This land, now three thousand feet above sea level, was only a few feet
above when these rhinoceroses moved over it in countless herds.
Everywhere were swamps filled with sponge moss, and tropical streams,
whose wealth of vegetation formed thick jungles along their banks. On
firmer ground, great areas were covered with a dense growth of rushes,
through which the paths of these animals were the only trails; while
higher up still, the soft damp soil gave a foothold to forests, through
which the great mastodons sounded their trumpet calls, as they roamed
about, tearing up trees with their powerful trunks and feasting upon the
rich, juicy roots.
[Illustration:
FIG. 24.—THREE-TOED HORSE, _Hypohippus_.
From the Middle Eocene of Colorado. (After Gidley.) In American Museum
of Natural History.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 25.—FOSSIL RHINOCEROS, _Teleoceras fossiger_.
From Sternberg’s quarry at Long Island, Phillips Co., Kansas.
Collected by Wortman; mounted in the American Museum of Natural
History. (After Osborn.)
]
That year, 1884, in which I explored the quarry at Long Island, was a
memorable one, not only because we secured a large carload of rhinoceros
bones, but also because we had with us Mr. J. B. Hatcher, who afterwards
helped to build up three great museums of vertebrate paleontology,—the
museums of Yale and Princeton and the Carnegie Museum. With the last he
was connected at the time of his death in 1904, just twenty years after
he made his first collection of vertebrate fossils with me. A bright,
earnest student, he gave promise of a future even then by his perfect
understanding of the work in hand and the thoughtful care which he
devoted to it. I have always been glad that I had the honor of being his
first teacher in the practical work of collecting, although he soon
graduated from my department, and requested me to let him take one side
of the ravine while I worked the other. He employed Mr. Overton’s son
with a plow and scraper, and got out a magnificent collection with no
further instructions from me.
That same year Professor Marsh came to my quarry and leased it from the
owner, and I never saw it again until 1905, when I came into my own once
more, and in addition to the splendid mastodon, mentioned earlier in
this chapter, found the material for two perfect mounts of the
rhinoceros. One is to be mounted at Munich, the other at Bonn.
With Professor Osborn’s consent, I give a photograph of the fine
specimen (Fig. 25) which Dr. Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry
for the American Museum. A vast collection from the same spot is stored
in the National Museum in its original packages, with which I filled a
car in 1884. I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of the
rhinoceros _Teleoceras fossiger_, which I secured in great numbers at
Long Island.
It is strange to think that the foundation on which these beds of
fresh-water deposits lie unconformably is the great Cretaceous sea
bottom, whose tilted and uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above
the carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Republican, Smoky Hill,
and Kansas rivers have carved their way through all these strata, so
that by following down these streams, one can get cross sections of the
country.
I have often asked men who were sure that there must be coal beneath the
surface, why, instead of hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did
not hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the Smoky Hill,
beginning at the Colorado line. The first stratum exposed is of course
the recent, with its sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling
buffalo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the Pleistocene
deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and fragments of rock mingled
together. From this formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the
great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of black shale with giant
septaria, the Fort Pierre Group of the Cretaceous, whose upper beds we
explored in Montana in 1876 for dinosaurs. In this formation, in Kansas,
I found a new species of _Clidastes_. The specimens are now in the
Kansas University collection, and the species has been named by Dr.
Williston _Clidastes westi_, in honor of the Kansas University
collector, the late Judge E. P. West.
We have not gone far down the river below the forks, before this
formation, which at McAllister topped the hills, passes under the river.
Then reddish and blue chalks occupy the country for some miles, and in
turn disappear to give place to yellowish and blue chalks, which finally
make way for the blue and almost white chalks that run under the river
near the mouth of Hackberry Creek in eastern Gove County.
At White Rock in Trego County the hard white limestone, in fortification
blocks, is piled ninety feet high. Further down appears the post
limestone of the Fort Benton Group, with its characteristic _Inoceramus_
shells; while in central Kansas, brown and white sandstone and
brilliantly colored clays occupy the whole region for sixty miles,
giving place at last to the hard limestones and the friable shales and
sandstones of the Upper Carboniferous. No coal, except very shallow
veins in the Upper Carboniferous and the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous,
has even been found in this big ditch, which, less than a quarter of a
mile wide at the head of the Smoky Hill branch at Wallace, broadens out
to a width of several miles at the mouth of the Kansas River.
It is impossible to compute the vast amount of mineral matter which has
been cut out from these Kansas plains and carried by the river into the
Mississippi and on to the Gulf. Since the first narrow trench cut its
way through the hardened ooze of the Cretaceous ocean bed, all the
flood-plains of the Missouri and the Mississippi below Kansas City have
been enriched by the material that once covered these valleys of Kansas,
and the delta below New Orleans has been partly built up by it.
It may interest my readers and give them a glimpse into the daily
routine of a fossil hunter’s life, if I quote one or two notes from a
diary which I kept during my work in these Loup Fork beds.
“Friday, July 11.—This is to record the most successful day since we
have been in the field. We have collected three sets of under-jaws,
three skulls. It has been extremely hot. We have put in eight hours of
hard work.”
“Saturday, July 12.—To-day I got out and packed our three skulls and
three lower jaws. They were within the space of a square yard. We got
some very fine bones, and best of all, a perfect front foot in position,
a perfect humerus, a perfect femur, except proximal articulation, the
premaxilla of a cat with a huge canine (saber-toothed tiger). We got
great quantities of the bones of the feet, an axis, and one other
vertebræ in good state of preservation, a fine scapula, etc. This
afternoon has been the hottest day of the season, but this evening the
wind changed to the north, and it is quite cool. I got in addition to
the specimens mentioned a maxilla of a saber-toothed tiger. The enormous
young canine was two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide.”
I might go on and quote indefinitely, but the story would be about the
same. I recall, however, one or two incidents connected with my work in
this field, which may be amusing or interesting to my readers.
Once in 1882, while collecting for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of
Harvard University, I met an old gentleman and his dear old wife, the
hair of both showing upon it the snows of many winters, sitting on a
board laid across a dry-goods box to which two wagon wheels had been
attached. A team of ponies harnessed with rope instead of leather, with
lines of the same material, completed the outfit. The old man and his
wife sat up very straight and dignified and demanded of me what I was
doing in that part of the country.
“Oh,” I answered, “I’m looking for rhinoceros bones in the loose sand of
the hills here.”
“Well,” the old man said, “I am interested in these old bones myself. I
don’t claim to be a scholar; in fact, I am quite illiterate, but I think
when this earth was in a molten state, these old hippopotamuses wallowed
around in the mud and got congealed in the rocks.”
The following incident I did not find quite so amusing. One day I
discovered turtle shells sticking out on either side of a narrow gulch
which cut through a large deposit of sand. In digging out those already
in sight, I found many more; collecting in all some twenty fine
specimens, but all quite small. Following down the gorge, I discovered
that it opened out, on Beaver Creek in Rawlins County, into a great
amphitheater several acres in extent and almost denuded of vegetation;
an ideal place for fossil hunting, as the elements had been digging out
and removing the sand for ages. And sure enough, I soon stumbled upon
the complete shell and skeleton, four feet in diameter, of a specimen of
Cope’s _Testudo orthopygia_; but it nearly broke my heart to find that
while the specimen had weathered out in a perfect condition, some
vandal—for I shall ever maintain that the wanton destruction of life
that now is or of the remains of life that once was, is wicked,—some man
had chopped it all to pieces with a mattock.
Passing on in a not very pleasant frame of mind, I came upon another
individual of huge proportions, which had suffered the same fate, and
then upon another; all that this rich-looking ground afforded had been
utterly ruined.
Angry at the thought that any man should commit such sacrilege,—for to
me these footsteps of the Creator in the sands of time are sacred,—and
bitterly disappointed, since I knew that I should very likely never
again come upon such huge specimens of the reptilian life of that age, I
walked into camp blinded by hot tears, and failed to notice a stranger
who was sitting there on a box.
“Some infernal vandal has been up this ravine,” I shouted to Will, “and
dug up with a mattock three of the finest turtles I ever saw.”
As if he had been shot, the man jumped from the box and exclaimed in
accents of heartfelt contrition, “It was me. I was out here digging
roots to build a fire with, and ran across them. I didn’t know they had
any value, and I wanted to see what was inside of them and dug into
them.”
His surprise and dismay were so comical that the murder vanished from my
heart, and overwrought as I was, I broke out into a fit of
uncontrollable laughter which used me up for the rest of the day.
Another time I had a rather unusual experience. My assistant, a Mr.
Wright, and I were digging out rhinoceros bones on Sappa Creek. We had
noticed a house on the other side of the creek, although dense timber
cut off most of its surroundings, and happening to look toward it once,
we saw a girl of about sixteen years rush out from the timber and begin
to climb the steep hill toward us. I never saw anyone run so fast up so
steep a hill. Her strength failed her, however, when she got to us, and
it was some time before she could tell her story. It seems that her
mother had gone out to milk, and as the ground was slippery from a rain
of the night before, she had fallen and dislocated one of the bones in
the palm of her hand.
All the men were away and had taken all the horses, and it was seventeen
miles to the nearest doctor. The girl, knowing that we were digging up
bones, had concluded that we could set them, and had come to us for
help. Although I had never attempted anything of the kind before, I
could not resist the poor child’s appeal and went to the house. The
mother lay moaning on her bed, and would answer nothing when I asked
whether I should try to set her hand. But as the girl was very desirous
that I should make the attempt, I decided to do so. So while Mr. Wright
held the arm, I put splints and a roller bandage under the hand, which
was laid on a table, and then forcibly pushed the bone back into its
natural position. After which I bandaged the hand tightly. I left
directions with the girl to hang a can of water with a small hole in it
over the hand, so that the water might drip on it and by evaporation
cool it and prevent inflammation. My instructions were carried out by
the brave girl, and her mother’s hand was soon as well as ever.
In these last chapters I have often wandered far afield, for it would
have taken too long to relate all the events of my various expeditions
in consecutive order. Hoping that my readers will pardon the
digressions, I return to the expedition of 1877.
Russell Hill proved a most efficient assistant, and it has always
grieved me that he should in later years have given up work in the
fossil fields for the practice of medicine. Will Brouse, too, was an
enthusiastic worker; he was not satisfied to be relegated to the pots
and kettles and horses, and not only did his duty as our teamster and
cook, but soon accomplished almost, if not quite as much in the field as
any one of us. I never had a more congenial party in all the years of my
field work.
But one day in August I received a bulky letter from Professor Cope.
“Turn over all the outfit to Mr. Hill,” he wrote, “and go at once to a
new field discovered in the desert of eastern Oregon. Go to Fort
Klamath, Oregon, and from there to Silver Lake, to a man by the name of
Duncan, the postmaster. He will guide you to the fossil bed in the heart
of the sage-brush desert. You will likely find human implements mingled
with extinct animals. You are to go secretly; tell no one where you are
going. Have your mail sent by a circuitous route, so you cannot be
traced.”
I received the Professor’s order with excitement and great joy; but in
spite of his injunction to start at once and without communicating my
intention to anyone, I could not bring myself to leave for the Pacific
Coast, to be gone for an indefinite time, without bidding good-by to my
father and mother, and I concluded that even if someone should find out
where I was going and try to follow me I could easily give him the slip
and get to the field first.
Buffalo, the nearest railway station, was seventy-five miles away, a two
days’ journey, with our big load of fossils. So I mounted my riding pony
and made the long trip the next day, reaching the station at sunset,
tired and sore. My pony, however, endowed with the enduring power
characteristic of a good Indian pony, was still fresh enough to shy at a
rattlesnake in the road, and as I happened to be sitting sideways in the
saddle, throw me to the ground within a few feet of the snake.
That night I went to my home in Ellsworth County, bade my dear ones
good-by for an indefinite length of time, and was back at Buffalo again
at midnight of the following day. My boys met me at the station with my
roll of blankets, tools, and baggage, and away I went to “fresh fields
and pastures new.”
CHAPTER VI
EXPEDITION TO THE OREGON DESERT IN 1877
At Monument Station, I was surprised to see Mr. S. W. Williston get
aboard with all his outfit. Williston did not know at first that I was
on the train, and when he entered my car, he was greatly astonished,
thinking that I was on his trail. He tried to find out my destination,
but failed. We slept together at Denver. Then he took a train south,
while I went north toward Cheyenne and the West.
Onward our train sped toward the land of the setting sun, through the
grand and impressive scenery of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas. At
Sacramento I took the railroad for Redding, where, with seven other
passengers, I entered a Concord coach drawn by a team of eight horses,
and continued my journey by stage.
It was a lovely August evening. The moon was at its full, and the night
was almost as bright as day. No sound broke the deep silence, except now
and then the whoo of an owl as it called to its mate far away in the
depth of the forest, or the plash of running water falling in cascades
over the shelving rocks and dashing against the boulders.
Higher and higher we climbed, through primeval forests of spruce and
fir, whose branches clove the sky a hundred feet above our heads. The
rarefied air filled our lungs with its life-giving tonic, exhilarating
us like wine. We knew that far above us rose Mount Shasta, the giant of
the range, but for a time the heavy timber shut out the view, and we
could see only the road ahead, winding up and up through the forests.
Then suddenly, without warning, we moved above the timber-line, and
Mount Shasta stood revealed in all its beauty, a perfect cone, towering
four thousand feet into the air, its robes of everlasting snow
glistening in the moonlight. Above, in the clear blue of the sky, the
stars sparkled like jewels in an immortal canopy.
It was the first time that any of us had looked upon that majestic
scene, and whatever may have been the differences of temperament among
us, we were one in the feeling of awe which the glorious picture
inspired. It laid a spell upon us; we were dumb before the invisible
presence of the Power that had reared this stupendous pinnacle, and
involuntarily our thoughts turned to that “city that hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God.”
Then to break the awful silence, and give some vent to our emotions, we
broke out into the old song, “’Way down upon the Suwanee River”; and so
we journeyed on for many hours, never out of sight of that majestic
form.
At Ashland I was obliged to wait for a driver with a buckboard and a
team of ponies to take me to Fort Klamath, Oregon. I was at that time a
great lover of the gentle art of fishing, and early in the morning,
before it was fully light, I was astir among the great live-oaks that
grace the town. Walking through the sleeping village, I ran across the
footprints of a large grizzly bear in the dust of the road, and followed
them through the vacant streets. Wherever a gate had been left open, the
bear had entered the yard, walked around the house, and come out at the
gate again. I hoped to get a glimpse of him, but was disappointed, as
the tracks led into the gloom of the forest. So I went fishing, and
caught some speckled beauties for breakfast.
That evening I was driven over to Fort Klamath, where I was kindly
invited to take possession of the commanding officer’s quarters and make
myself at home; an invitation which I proceeded to accept at once.
Learning that a sheep-owner a few miles away had killed a grizzly, I
went out to his camp to see it. Sure enough, there lay the mighty
carcass, encircled with four inches of grease, enough for the polls of
all the boys in Oregon. It seemed that as the time for his winter nap
was approaching, Mr. Bruin had been laying in a supply of fuel by
devouring the fat wethers of our friend’s flock. The latter had built a
heavy brush fence around the sheep, and with the help of a large number
of hounds, had kept his range free from coyotes, but he had been
helpless before the attacks of this big bear. When he watched on top of
the brush fence, he was not molested, but no sooner did he seek the
comfortable cot in his tent, than his slumbers were broken by the
piteous bleat of some sheep, as it was carried off to the woods by the
bear.
About ten days before I reached Klamath, he had been awakened in the
middle of the night by a commotion in the flock, and rushing out in his
shirt into the cool night air, had seen the bear only ten feet away,
across a deep and narrow stream. Without thinking of the consequences to
himself if he only wounded the creature, he opened fire with his
Winchester, and the first shot broke the bear’s neck.
When I arrived, the skin had been removed, but the huge carcass, which
must have weighed at least a ton, had been lying in the hot August sun
ever since. The sheep-owner (I am sorry that I have forgotten his name,
as I was under heavy obligations to him) promised me that after
breakfast he would help me in the not very enviable task of removing the
decaying flesh from the bones. But after one whiff from the windward
side, he asked a pertinent question, was I fond of trout, and upon my
answering yes, remarked that he knew of a creek where he could get some
beauties, and immediately disappeared. I saw him no more that morning.
At the first thrust of my knife into the bear, the stench was so
horrible that I grew deathly sick. I filled my pipe and tried to find
relief in smoking, but even then the odor was overpowering, and I smoked
and sickened through the livelong day, until I had cleaned the filthy
flesh from the bones, and they had been tied up in gunny-sacks and hung
in a tree to dry. Then into the creek I went and with soap and sand
scrubbed and scoured my body; but the horrid smell still hung about me,
and I could eat neither supper nor breakfast the next morning, although
at dinner I managed to stow away a good square meal. But even now, after
thirty years, if you say “bear” to me, I can smell that bear.
At Klamath I hired for my assistant a man named George Loosely. I also
bought two saddle ponies and one to carry the pack; and with a
government tent and other outfit and rations purchased at the
commissary,—we had our flour baked into bread by the post baker,—we
started for Silver Lake, although no one at the post could give us any
directions. I had a department map, sent to me by Professor Cope, which
recorded, mistakenly as we found later, that Sprague River rose in
Silver Lake. The government road to the east crossed the Williamson
River on a government bridge, and came to an abrupt end in an Indian
village on the western bank of Sprague River. So we decided to take the
road as far as we could and then follow up the river to its source in
the lake.
When we reached the Williamson River, we found there the lodge of a
Snake Indian, who appeared dressed in red paint and a breech-cloth, and
demanded toll. But as American citizens we had paid taxes to help pay
for that bridge; so we refused to pay toll for the use of our own
property, and rode across in spite of the threats hurled at us.
We reached Sprague River that same evening, and went into camp a short
distance from a large Indian town. The houses, built by government
contractors of rough logs, consisted of a single room with a shake roof.
The Indians had torn out the board floors, and instead of using the
fireplaces and chimneys which the builders had erected for their
convenience, they had cut holes in the roofs, and built their fires in
the middle of the floor, sleeping around them at night as their fathers
used to do in their lodges or Sibley tents.
George, who was more familiar with them than I was, learned that a chief
lay dying in one of the houses, and after supper he left me and went to
witness the death ceremonies. After stowing away the bread and coffee
between our mattresses and covering them with blankets, and hiding the
bacon at the bottom of the mess box with tin dishes piled on top of it
so that I should hear the rattle if a thieving Indian attempted to get
at it, I, being tired, dropped off to sleep.
About three o’clock in the morning, George appeared, having been shut up
in the house with the dying chief all night. When the medicine man began
his incantations, the doors and windows were closed, while the steaming
Indians danced in a circle around the dying chief, forcing the unwilling
George to take part in the ceremonies. All night long they moved around
in their death dance to the music of their drums and the wild
gesticulations of the medicine man, and when George finally got away, he
was about exhausted. He was soon lost in sleep, and as I habitually lie
on my sound ear, neither of us heard anything through the night. But the
next morning, when George had put on the coffee to boil and went into
the mess box for the bacon, it had disappeared. The dishes had been
carefully replaced.
After a breakfast of bread and coffee, we were early in the saddle,
taking a heavy trail that led north and skirted Sprague River. By the
merest chance, we met a white man, the first we had seen since leaving
the post, and we stopped to ask the way to Silver Lake. A number of
Snake Indians were standing around at the time. The man told us to go
north on the trail to a sheep camp in Sican Valley, where we would
receive further directions, and thanking him, we rode confidently
forward.
Just as the sun was sinking, we entered a splendid forest of fir and
spruce, and soon found that our trail forked. The heavy, well-traveled
branch turned a little west of north; the other, leading due north, had
apparently not been used since last year, as it was covered with old
leaves. We did not know what to do, as the man whom we had met in the
morning had not mentioned this fork. While we were talking about it, we
heard the jingling bells of a pack horse or Indian cayuse, and soon a
boy hove in sight, driving a couple of pack ponies. Moving to one side
to let him pass, I asked him where he was going.
“To Sican Valley, to a sheep ranch,” he answered, and immediately was
lost to sight among the giant trees. We meekly fell in behind and
hurried after him.
Suddenly we came out into a natural park, the end of our trail. Five
Indian lodges stood about in the open space, and five valiant braves, in
their usual attire of paint and breech-cloths, with the inevitable
Winchester, stepped forward to inform us that “white man was lost in the
woods,” and that they would show him the trail for two dollars.
“Where is that miserable papoose?” I demanded, but they only grinned and
repeated, “We will show you the road for two dollars.”
It was my habit, in a crisis of this kind, to smoke, for I regret to say
that I was for many years a lover of the soothing weed; so, drawing out
of my saddlebag a pound of fragrant “Lone Jack,” I proceeded to fill my
pipe and decide upon my further course. Instantly the Indians crowded
around me, and dropping the butts of their guns to the ground, pulled
out their tobacco pouches, and opening them wide, held them up to be
filled, crying in chorus, “Me tobac! Me tobac!”
But the memory of the deceitful boy was still rankling in my mind. I
told George to follow me with the pack horse, and deliberately lighting
my pipe and filling my lungs with smoke to their utmost capacity, I blew
a cloud of it into the faces of the expectant beggars. Then I drove my
spurs into my pony’s flanks and started off in a mad race against time,
as the long shadows warned me only too plainly that the daylight, our
only guide now, would soon leave us. I did not look back, but George,
who did, saw the Indians, in anger, level their rifles as they shouted
to us to stop.
That race with darkness was an exciting one, but just before night
overtook us, we reached the trail which we had left to follow the lying
Indian boy. In our haste, our bread had been torn from its sack by the
outstretched limb of a tree, and was lost. However, we were so thankful
to have escaped paying toll to those filthy Snakes, that we cheerfully
made our supper of coffee, and sought our blankets.
At the first streak of daylight, after another meal of coffee, we were
in our saddles; and we traveled all day, until, just as the sun was
setting, we heard the welcome bleat of sheep and saw the herders driving
their flocks down the slopes of the neighboring hills to their corrals
in Sican Valley. Following them, we soon spied the camp in the heavy
timber and smelled the delicious savor of a pot of mutton that was
boiling over the fire. And before long, seated at the rude table, we
were enjoying to the uttermost the hospitality of the camp.
We had learned on the journey that Sprague River rises in the heart of
the mountains, instead of in Silver Lake, and we had crossed the divide
between it and the lake before reaching Sican Valley. The next morning
our sheepmen directed us on our way; and that same evening we were
skirting the lake’s lovely shores. Its wide expanse of water put me in
mind of my boyhood days on Otsego Lake or the Glimmer-glass.
We soon reached the hospitable home of Mr. Duncan, the postmaster of
Silver Lake. He had built a comfortable house of logs, with a large
chimney at one end and an old-fashioned fireplace, around which, as the
nights were cold, we gathered and talked until far into the night.
Mr. Duncan’s family consisted of his wife and daughter, a dear, good
girl, who will forgive me, I am sure, if I tell a story at her expense.
George and I were sent to bed in a lean-to, and as our bedroom was next
to that of the Duncans and the stoppings had fallen out of some of the
chinks in the wall between, we could hear everything that was said in
their room. In the middle of the night I woke up and heard the old
gentleman talking to his wife about their daughter.
“Mother,” he said, “I think John will be a good husband for Mary, don’t
you?”
Before she could answer, Mary, who had a bed at the other end of the
parents’ room, called out with great energy, “I think so too, father!”
In an instant all was still, while George and I, in our efforts to keep
quiet, stuffed the bedclothes into our mouths until we were almost
suffocated.
We unloaded our weary pack horse, and the next day brought our supplies,
and loaded them into Mr. Duncan’s wagon. Then taking him with us for
guide, we started on our long drive to the boneyard, fifty-six miles
through the great sage-brush desert of eastern Oregon.
On we journeyed, through what seemed an interminable expanse of
sage-brush, greasewood, and sand. The bunches of sage-brush topped
conical mounds of sand, whose sides were scoured and polished by the
winds that howled in and out through the labyrinth of hills, laden with
drifting sand. If one could have gained an elevation above the level of
these sandhills, and looked out over the landscape, one would have gazed
upon a scene of even greater desolation than that afforded by the
parched short-grass plains of western Kansas,—a dreary, monotonous waste
of olive green, stretching away north, east, and south, as far as the
eye could reach, and shut in on the west by the great ranges of the
Sierras, whose flanks, dark below the timber line with heavy forests,
were deeply scarred above with glistening white glaciers.
We followed the California road to Oregon, for in those days Oregon was
practically an unknown territory, with the exception of the Willamette
Valley. And I suppose that it is still so, for that moist, fertile
valley differs as widely from the vast semi-desert east of the Cascade
Range as the Santa Clara Valley from the cactus-covered sandhills of
southern California.
At night, after a day’s journey through sand and sage-brush, we came to
a ranch beside an alkaline lake in the very heart of the desert. Here,
in a cabin built of logs from the neighboring mountains, lived the
hermit of this region, a man named Lee Button. Had it not been that the
road passed his door, he would have seen only a hunter now and then, out
after the deer which abounded in the desert, or perhaps the cattlemen
when in winter they turned their cattle loose in the desert to look out
for themselves. On all the neighboring ranches, the cattle were turned
into the desert for food and shelter in winter. Here, protected from
storms, they fed upon the alkaline grass and sweet sage and upon the
thick leaves which fell in handfuls from the greasewood bushes. These
cattle had cut innumerable paths at every conceivable angle, and one
unaccustomed to the country might easily become confused and lose
himself in the labyrinth of trails. There was horror in the thought of
being lost in that solitude.
Mr. Duncan put up his horses in the barn of the ranch, which was well
stocked with hay and oats, and we picketed our ponies on a flat covered
with alkaline grass on the borders of the lake. Then from under a
certain post which he knew of, Mr. Duncan dug up a tin can containing
the key of the cabin. Past experience had taught Mr. Button caution. He
had gone to California once, after a herd of horses, leaving his door
unlocked, and some prowling immigrant had abused his hospitality and
robbed his cabin of its store of food and blankets. So now, when he left
home, he locked the door and hid the key, giving, however, the secret of
its hiding-place to his neighbor, Mr. Duncan.
His cooking utensils, consisting of a camp kettle, a frying pan, a Dutch
oven, and a coffee pot, were brought out and cleaned, and the larder
searched for food. It was the custom of the country at that day to
consider food and shelter free to all. I was offered the next year a
house, blankets, flour, and bacon, as much as I could use for nothing,
if I wanted to spend the winter on a ranch in eastern Oregon. I was only
expected to cut my own wood and cook my own food.
Soon a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and the burning
sage-brush was filling the air with that indescribable odor from which
one is never free while in the desert. We had traveled through great
droves of wild geese along the lake, and as they were so tame that they
simply stepped out of our way like barnyard geese, we did not think it
worth while to waste ammunition on them. So I set three traps, common
steel traps such as are used for catching coons, and strewed oats around
them. The next morning I found a brant in one, a magpie in another, and
the house cat in the third. We let the cat and the magpie go, and
breakfasted on the brant. Our usual fare was bacon, bread, and coffee,
and sometimes dried apples. I worked for years in Oregon with no other
food, except an occasional deer or mountain sheep.
The next day, trusting entirely to Mr. Duncan’s guidance, we pushed on
without a trail, winding in and out among the hillocks with no landmarks
but the mountains in the west. At sunset, we came out into the open on
the shore of a small alkaline lake. “Fossil Lake,” I named it at once,
and it goes by that name to this day. This pond, as we should call it in
old New York, covered only a few acres then, and is now entirely dried
up.
“There,” shouted Mr. Duncan, as he pointed with his whip to the lake
shore, “there is the boneyard.”
I instantly requested him to help George get supper and pitch the tent,
and seizing my collecting bag, rushed down to the shore. The clay bottom
of the ancient lake had been dried out, and now formed the shore of the
remaining water. This old lake bed had once extended over a much larger
area, but it had been partially buried beneath large piles of drifting
sand. Scattered through the loose sand and on the clay bed were great
numbers of the bones and teeth of reptiles, birds, and mammals,
indiscriminately mingled. I had come upon a boneyard indeed.
I was down on the sand at once, picking up bones and teeth and putting
them in piles. No two bones seemed to belong together, and the skulls
and arches had been crushed beneath the feet of animals, probably cattle
and deer, which had come down to drink at the lake. What pleased me,
however, was the fact that scattered among these remains of an earlier
day, were arrow-heads and spear-points of polished obsidian, or volcanic
glass. I was too much excited then to notice that I did not find a
single bone or tooth in its original position in the clay matrix, but
that all were loose, detached, and scattered, and that the implements
were lying about in the same way.
As Mr. Duncan was to return to the post-office at Silver Lake the next
morning, I gathered a cigar-boxful of loose teeth, arrow-heads, and
spear-points, and packed them to send off to Professor Cope. And that
night, by a sage-brush fire, I wrote the letter which he saw fit to
publish in the _American Naturalist_, a magazine of which he was the
editor, under a title of his own, “Pliocene Man,” and signed “E. D.
Cope.”
For weeks I sifted through my fingers the fine sand of that lake shore,
picking out bone after bone. The only specimen which I found undisturbed
in the clay matrix was part of the skull of a hairy mammoth, or _Elephas
primigenius_.
Dr. Shufeldt is the author of a valuable memoir on the fossil birds of
this region,—“The Fossil Avi-Fauna of the Equus Beds of the Oregon
Desert,” published by the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. He worked
over the collection made by the late Professor Condon of the Oregon
State University, the collection which Professor Cope made a few years
after mine, and mine.
In these three collections, he finds five species of grebes, and nine of
gulls, of which two species are new to science, Professor Condon being
the discoverer of one, while I found the other. Of cormorants, there are
two species, one discovered by Cope. One species, quite common among the
fossil remains, is now extinct. There is a new swan also, described by
Professor Cope, who writes of it: “This swan was discovered by
ex-Governor Whitaker of Oregon [who discovered the Fossil Lake locality]
in the Pliocene formations of the state. The same bird was afterwards
procured by my assistant, Charles H. Sternberg.” Altogether there are
nineteen species of Anseres, i. e., geese, ducks, swans, etc., of which
two are new.
One of my discoveries was a flamingo, which was dedicated to Professor
Cope under the title _Phœnicopterus copei_. Dr. Shufeldt says: “It is a
fact of no little interest that a flamingo inhabited the lakes of the
Silver Lake region of Oregon during the Pliocene Epoch.” The collections
include a heron and a couple of coots also. Among the fowl are four
grouse, discovered by Cope, and an entirely new genus and species which
I had the honor of finding. Of eagles, there are two species. There are
also a great horned owl, a blackbird, and a raven.
Among the other fossil remains taken from this region are six genera of
fish, a majority of them new, and fifteen species of fossil mammalia,
including two llamas, three horses, an elephant, a dog, an otter, a
beaver, a mouse, a great sloth, _Mylodon_, as large as a grizzly bear,
and other forms.
“Thomas Condon,” writes Dr. Shufeldt in his memoir, “was the first
scientific man to visit the Fossil Lake region, with the results already
stated. Cope and his assistant Charles Sternberg came later, and
gathered many hundred bones and bone fragments.” And in the preface to
his “Tertiary Vertebrata,” Vol. III, page xxvii, Professor Cope writes:
“The Tertiary formations explored in 1878 were the John Day, Loup Fork,
and Equus beds. These were examined by Charles H. Sternberg both in
Washington and Oregon; in the former near to Fort Walla Walla, and in
the latter, in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada. The basin of an
ancient lake, originally discovered by Governor Whitaker of Oregon, was
found strewn with the bones of llamas, elephants, horses, sloths, and
smaller animals, with birds, and all were collected by Mr. Sternberg and
safely forwarded to Philadelphia. I examined this locality myself in
1879 and obtained further remains of extinct and recent species of
mammalia found mingled with numerous worked flints.”
The reader will notice that Cope puts my expedition in ’78 instead of
’77 and that Dr. Shufeldt gives Cope’s visit to Fossil Lake as before
mine, when, in reality, it was two years later.
On p. 420 of his memoir, Dr. Shufeldt writes: “We must believe that it
still remains problematical whether man was there, and further
comparative search is demanded to decide whence came, and at what time,
those stone implements of human manufacture, commingled as they are with
the bones of the animals, many of which are long since extinct.” And
Professor Cope says on the same subject: “Scattered everywhere in the
deposit were obsidian implements of human manufacture. Some of these
were of inferior workmanship, and many of them covered with a patin of
no great thickness, which completely replaced the luster of the surface.
Other specimens were bright as when first made. The abundance of these
flints was remarkable, and suggested that they may have been shot at the
game, both winged and otherwise, that in former times frequented the
lake.”
After I had written the letter already mentioned, having carefully gone
over all the ground in the vicinity of Fossil Lake, and longing for new
worlds to conquer, I started out one day on my pony through the desert,
hoping to find another locality in which the wind had uncovered a fossil
bed. I spent the greater part of the day in fruitless search, and was
about to return home when I was attracted by the top of a dead spruce
tree sticking out of a sandhill. The rest of the tree had been
completely buried by the sand.
My curiosity was aroused, and I climbed to the top of the hill to
examine the spruce. When I reached the top, however, I found myself
looking down into a pleasant little valley, which had been scooped out
by the wind, and, descending, I discovered that I had stumbled upon the
former site of an Indian village. Places near where the lodges had stood
were marked by piles of the bleached bones of existing species of
antelope, deer, rabbits, etc. None of these bones were petrified like
those at Fossil Lake.
Near the site of each lodge stood a large mortar, made of volcanic rock,
with a pestle lying in it. They had probably been used by the squaws for
grinding up acorns and other materials for bread-making. Doubtless a
storm of sand had forced the villagers to flee for their lives without
giving them time to save even these valuable mortars.
I found a spring of cold water which had built up a mound of white sand,
and from the side of a sandhill I pulled out the back part of a human
skull. I could not tell how large the village had been, as it extended
into the sandhill.
I soon found where the ancient arrow-maker had had his shop by the great
quantities of cast-off obsidian chips that covered the ground, as well
as by the broken and perfect arrow-heads and spear-points, beautifully
polished and finished, and the knives, drills, and the like that lay
about. I did not find a vestige of anything made of iron.
Having secured a number of the obsidian points, which I afterwards sent
to Cope, I started for camp; but I had delayed too long, and night
overtook me before I reached home. My pony and I came near being lost in
the desert. I gave him the lines, but I was much worried at not seeing
the welcome glow of the camp fire, when I had thought that I must be
near my tent. Finally I shouted, and at last heard a faint answer. But
even then, owing to my deaf ear, I could not locate the camp, and had to
wait until George came up and piloted me in.
Now without doubt the arrow-heads and spear-points mingled with the
bones at Fossil Lake are of the same manufacture as those which I found
at this Indian village, although the latter are not so much weathered,
having evidently been recently covered with sand. I conclude, therefore,
that the implements mingled with the bones are no older than the
village, perhaps a hundred years old. They were probably shot by the
Indians of the village at the wild animals which doubtless came in great
numbers to the lake to drink. Then some powerful wind, like that which
covered the village, drifted away the sand that lay over the fossil
bones, and the flints, being too heavy to be carried away with the sand,
dropped down and mingled with the bones. This seems to me the only
possible explanation. And I am glad to say that so high an authority as
Professor J. C. Merriam of the University of California, after the most
careful study and explorations, agrees with me in this. He has recently
been over the Fossil Lake region, and he assures me that it is a mistake
to suppose that the human implements found there were contemporary with
the extinct animals of the Equus Beds.
Whenever George and I had collected a load of fossils, we took them in
to Button’s ranch. One day we were late in starting, and realized that
we should have to hurry to reach the ranch before dark. As so often
happens, this was the very occasion upon which we were fated to be
delayed.
At a certain place on our route, we had to pass some mud springs,
circular wells filled to the brim with thick, yellowish mud of the
consistency of mortar. In wet weather they continually boiled up without
overflowing, but to-day they were covered with a hard coating of dry
mud, cracked deeply in all directions.
I called to George, who was driving the pack horse, to watch him and see
that he did not jump into the spring that we were just passing; but the
words were hardly out of my mouth when the miserable wretch made a
running jump, and landing in the middle of the crust, broke through and
went down into the thick, nasty mud. As he was going down, he seemed to
realize what he had done, and managed to get his front feet over the rim
of solid earth. And there he hung, the broad pack—we had brought along
our tent and blankets—helping to buoy him up.
We sprang from our horses, and made a rush to save our precious fossils,
beside which everything else, including the mischievous pony, was of no
account. We had to cut the ropes that bound the fossils and camp outfit
to the animal, and when we had them safe on solid ground, tie a rope
around his neck and pull him out. Of course he was thoroughly
frightened, and did everything in his power to help us. Such a looking
horse you never saw as he was when we got him out. His whole body was
covered with a coat of sticky, yellow mud, which we could not scrape
off. We had to take him into a creek and give him such a scrubbing as, I
think, no member of the genus _Equus_ ever had before or since.
All this took time, and it was late at night before we reached the
ranch. It was our habit, when we got to the cabin and felt that it would
be too much trouble to open our pack and get out our own supplies, to
help ourselves from Mr. Button’s store. So, after we had put the horses
in the barn and given them a liberal feed of oats and plenty of hay, we
went into the larder to get something for our own supper, for by that
time we were pretty hungry.
After supper I lay down on the absent lord’s blankets, and was smoking
the pipe of peace, when a knock was heard at the door. It surprised me,
as it was the custom of the country to walk in without the formality of
knocking. I shouted, “Come in!” and a short, heavy-set man entered. He
said that he had been overtaken by night, and as both he and his team
were in need of food, rest, and shelter, he wanted to know whether we
would take him in.
“Why, certainly,” I answered. I have noticed that most men are liberal
with other men’s property. “I don’t own the ranch, but we have just put
our horses in the barn, where there is plenty of hay and oats, and there
is plenty of food here. George will show you the way to the barn and
help you unhitch, and I will have supper ready when you return.”
He thanked me, and while they were putting up the team, I got a hot
supper with materials from Mr. Button’s larder. This meal was greatly
relished by our midnight guest.
I returned to the bed and my pipe, and was entering into a lively
conversation with the stranger, when the thought suddenly flashed into
my head, What if this man owns the ranch? I sprang from the bed on the
instant, and fired pointblank the question, “Do you know Lee Button?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” was the answer.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the stranger, and I felt so cheap that I would have sold out
for nothing. But this was Mr. Button’s chance to show what sort of a man
he was, and when I apologized for the freedom with which we had made
ourselves at home in his house and used his goods, he told me that we
had done exactly right, and that he would have felt hurt if we had acted
otherwise.
He became a true friend and helper, and his log cabin proved a valuable
place of shelter for my party during some of the cold October nights. If
these lines should ever reach his eyes, they carry to him my cordial
thanks for his hospitality.
CHAPTER VII
EXPEDITION TO THE JOHN DAY RIVER IN 1878
During the winter 1877–’78 I camped on Pine Creek, Washington, exploring
the swamps in the neighborhood and fighting against water to secure
specimens. We had dug a large shaft down to the bed of gravel, twelve
feet below the surface, in which bones were to be found, but every
morning we found that the hole had filled with mud and water over night,
and we had to spend hours bailing it out. When we finally got it clear
again, we had little time or strength left for securing fossils. This
performance had to be repeated day after day, and of course the farther
we excavated, the more water there was to be bailed out. I don’t think
that we were dry a single day that winter. But luckily the water was
warm, and we did not suffer from colds.
On the twenty-third of April I started with a team and wagon from Fort
Walla Walla, accompanied by my two assistants, Joe Huff and “Jake”
Wortman, the latter at that time an intelligent young man from Oregon,
who had been introduced to me the winter before by my brother, Surgeon
George M. Sternberg, at that time post surgeon of Fort Walla Walla.
During the past six months Wortman had been my guest at my camp on Pine
Creek. Afterwards he became known to science as Dr. J. L. Wortman.
We skirted the Blue Mountains in a southwesterly direction, traveling
through the beautiful wheat-fields of that fertile region; and striking
south at Cayuse Station on the Umatilla Reserve, we climbed the long
slopes of the mountains and plunged down into the Grande Rounde, once
the bed of an ancient lake, but now a lovely valley nestling among the
hills. From this point we drove south to Baker City, and leaving behind
us the jagged peaks of the Powder River Mountains, struck the John Day
River at Canyon City.
On the second of May we camped on the other side of the mountains in a
large meadow. The boys went hunting and got a deer. On the third, our
road led us again through rugged mountains, covered in places with ice,
and we had to cut footholds for our horses, as they were smooth-shod. We
passed through a large mining gulch, where men were at work
placer-digging for gold. The whole surface of the country had been dug
over, and was disfigured with holes and ditches and heaps of earth.
On the fifth of May, after passing through Canyon City, we started for
the John Day Basin. It snowed nearly all day. On the road we met a man
who told us of a rich fossil leaf locality, on the Van Horn ranch; and
after a sixteen-mile drive we found the place and secured some very fine
specimens. The leaf impressions were found in a soft, shaly clay-stone,
and were very abundant, representing well-preserved Tertiary flora. That
night we feasted on a large salmon trout which I caught in an irrigation
ditch.
On the sixth (I am following my notebook) we worked all day. I collected
two hundred specimens, and Mr. Wortman eighty-five. They were all very
fine, and represented the oak, the maple, and other species. I secured
some fish vertebræ also. This is another case in which I lost credit for
early discoveries. I was told by Professor Cope, a few years before his
death, that these specimens had never been examined.
In this same locality there is a bed of rock so light that it floats. I
threw a large mass of it at some object in the water, and was amazed to
see it float off down the stream. It was the first time that I had ever
seen a rock lighter than water.
On the seventh of May, after a journey of fifteen days from Walla Walla,
we reached Dayville, a mile below the crossing of the South Fork of the
John Day River. One of the first men I met was a certain Bill Day, whom
I soon after hired as assistant. He had for years been making
collections of the fossil vertebrates here, usually sending them to
Professor Marsh. I was able to secure a large and fine collection from
him and another mountain man, a Mr. Warfield, who had also spent much
time collecting fossils. Both men had been employed by Professor Marsh
during his expedition in this region, and were very careful workmen.
We camped on Cottonwood Creek and prepared to pack into the Basin, or
Cove as it has been called. For a hundred and fifty miles of its course,
the John Day flows east, skirting the Blue Mountains, but here at
Cottonwood or Dayville, it has turned north and cut a great canyon, four
thousand feet deep, through the heart of the mountains, the so-called
Grande Coulée, since known as the Picture Gorge. At the foot of this
canyon, the mountains swing away from the river in a great horseshoe
bend, closing in upon it again several miles below. This amphitheater,
three miles wide and thirteen long, is a scene of surprising beauty. The
brilliantly colored clays and volcanic ash-beds of the Miocene of the
John Day horizon paint the landscape with green and yellow and orange
and other glowing shades, while in the background, towering upward for
two thousand feet, rise rows upon rows of mighty basaltic columns,
eight-sided prisms, each row standing a little back of the one just
below, and the last crowned with evergreen forests of pine and fir and
spruce. But no pen can picture the glorious panorama.
Ever since Cretaceous times, when a quiet inland sea laid down the
thousand feet of Kansas chalk, here in the John Day region vulcanism has
held sway; almost until to-day. Indeed I have often seen the summit of
old Mount Hood wreathed with menacing clouds of smoke, as if she were
preparing to pour forth again her floods of molten lava and devastate
the region.
When volcanic action first began, great masses of ashes must have been
thrown out over the country, settling in the lakes and covering the
remains of animals which had been accumulating there for ages. Then
floods of lava, one after another, poured out over the forests, until
they lay buried beneath two thousand feet of volcanic rock. Where did
this immense mass of molten rock come from, and how? A dike crosses the
Basin, and for fifteen miles the basaltic columns lie along its edges
like cordwood; so we know that some of the lava at least was squeezed up
out of the earth’s crust through narrow cracks.
I remember once, as I was standing with Uncle Johnnie Kirk, the hermit
of the Cove, in front of his cabin, he pointed to the basaltic cliffs
that towered above us, and observed gravely, “All vegetable matter.” He
had found at the base remains of the forests which the lava had
engulfed, and had concluded that the whole mass represented similar
remains.
Before moving the outfit into the fossil beds I took my pony and started
off to spy out the land. Following a horse trail that led up the gentle
slope west of the canyon represented in Dr. Merriam’s picture of the
Mascall Beds I reached a tableland, which proved to be the divide
between Cottonwood and Birch creeks. Here I found that the trail leading
down to the mouth of Birch Creek was very steep—one could have greased
one’s boots and slid the whole distance of several hundred feet. I was
afraid to ride down and led my pony, but I soon learned that an Oregon
pony has long, well-developed legs and can climb up and down better than
I could myself.
When I reached the river at the mouth of the Grande Coulée, I found to
my dismay that all the rich-looking green and brown fossil beds were on
the other side, where the amphitheater which I have mentioned is cut out
of the flank of the mountains. As a boy I had learned to swim
dog-fashion, and as the river was not over thirty or forty feet wide,
and I was determined, after coming so far, to find some fossils and a
good camping ground, I decided to strip, jump out as far as I could, and
paddle the rest of the way across.
No sooner thought than done. In I sprang, discovering too late that I
had reckoned without my host and that the river, which had been penned
in for miles by the walls of the canyon, was here flowing away from its
prison with amazing swiftness and power. My weak little body was as
helpless as a straw in its grasp: down I went, and striking a boulder at
the bottom, was flung up five feet into the air, I took in breath and
closed my mouth as I went down again; tossing me hither and thither like
a cork, beating me against rocks and hurling me high into the air, the
river bore me swiftly on, until at last, thank God! it tired of its toy,
and threw me to one side into deep water, under a willow whose welcoming
branches I eagerly clasped. There I hung until I had regained my
strength enough to pull myself out.
But the fossil vertebrates of the John Day beds were still across the
river and the questions which I had crossed the mountain and risked my
life to answer were still waiting for replies. Unwilling to return home
beaten I walked up and down the river shore, and was delighted to find
an old boat caught in a pile of driftwood. I dug it out with my bare
hands, only to find that its seams had parted and that its bottom was as
full of holes as a sieve. Not dismayed, I found a bed of sticky clay
with which I calked my ship, and venturing again into the flood, managed
to get to the other shore before the boat sank.
I found a place to camp lower down, at the mouth of a canyon which
opened out into the level country, and on a little creek that ran in
front of Uncle Johnnie’s cabin. I was very well pleased with my
explorations in the fossil beds also, for I found the skull of an
Oreodon, a hog-like creature which, judging from the abundance of skulls
and skeletons, must have lived in droves during the time when this rock
was being deposited in the lakes of this region. These animals were
herbivorous in habit. Uncle Johnnie always referred to them as bears. He
often brought a skull into camp with the remark, “Here’s another bar’s
head. I’ve killed hundreds of ’em in ole Virginia.”
I returned to camp much elated, and was planning to pack the outfit into
the Basin the next day, when to my disgust Joe Huff, who owned the
horses, refused to pack them, as he did not want to run the risk of
injuring them. It was useless to tell him that he had been hired to do
what I wanted, etc.; he was not to be moved. So I paid him off, and saw
him start for his home near Moscow, Idaho, riding bareback. I felt sorry
for him, but he had a stubborn fit on, and there was no doing anything
with him. After I had hired Bill Day, he wanted me to overlook the past
and re-employ him, but it was too late then.
I suppose Bill Day must have weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds,
but he was an expert hunter and a keen observer. He owned a herd of
ponies and furnished me with all that I wanted, and as he knew every
inch of the fossil beds and all the best camping grounds, his services
were invaluable. He kept our larder supplied with venison, also. I think
my success in that region was largely due to his assistance. I was also
indebted to a Mr. Mascall, a man who lived on the second bottom of the
river. He had an extra log cabin behind the one he lived in, and he let
us use it as a storeroom for our extra supplies of food and for our
fossils, when we began to secure them.
This Mr. Mascall had a wife and daughter, and when we came in from the
fossil beds, after several weeks of camping out, it seemed almost like
coming home to be able to put our feet under a table, eat off stone
dishes, and drink our coffee out of a china cup, and to sleep on a
feather bed instead of a hard mattress and roll of blankets. Then Mr.
Mascall was a good gardener, and always had fresh vegetables, a most
enjoyable change from hot bread, bacon, and coffee. I shall not soon
forget his hospitality.
[Illustration:
FIG. 26.—SKULL AND TUSKS OF IMPERIAL MAMMOTH, _Elephas imperator_.
In American Museum of Natural History.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 27.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) Upper John Day
exposure.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 28.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) Middle John Day
exposure.
]
When all was ready, we were taken across the river in Mr. Mascall’s
boat, swimming our horses. Then the packs were adjusted, and the
wearisome climb up the face of the mountains began. It usually took us
half a day to reach the summit. Then we climbed down steep slopes and
over spurs of the hills, until we reached Uncle Johnnie Kirk’s
hospitable cabin, a 12 × 14 structure of rough logs with a shake roof.
He kept bachelor’s hall and lived all alone, except when some cowman or
fossil hunter came along. We pitched our tent near his house.
Not far away there was a tract of bad lands, called the Cone, the
largest in the John Day Basin, covering, I should judge, a section of
land. It was cut into the usual fantastic forms, peaks, ridges, and
battlements, and slender spires sometimes a hundred feet high, and as
thickly clustered as those of some old Gothic cathedral. Their summits
were crowned with hard concretions, which protected their almost
perpendicular sides from destruction by the elements.
The drainage canals spread out through this territory like the ribs of a
fan, converging at the entrance, and woe to the man who chanced to be
caught in one of them during a rain, for the steep slopes shot the water
down into them with such amazing rapidity that before he could turn
around he would be engulfed in fathoms of water. We always climbed up to
some high point the minute we heard the rain strike the rocks above us,
and waited until the storm was over and the water had run out. A ditch
containing twenty feet, sometimes, of water would dry up as soon as it
stopped raining, so steep was the slope of its bed.
I was continually impressed in this region by the power of running
water. Not only is this manifested in the mighty canyons which have been
carved out during the course of ages from the solid rock, but I stood
transfixed with astonishment once, at the mouth of the little creek in
front of Uncle Johnnie’s cabin, on finding it dammed by a mass of
basaltic rock, weighing at least twenty tons, which had been brought
from its native hills, three miles away, by a flood of water, and left
stranded here. All the side canyons that empty into the John Day River
have dumped their loads of boulders there, in some places damming the
stream or creating a series of rapids.
I soon found that all the ground in the fossil beds which was easy to
get at had been gone over. Here and there we would run across a pile of
broken bones and a hole from which a skull had been taken. When I asked
Bill what he had meant by leaving the bones of the skeleton behind, he
answered, “We were only looking for heads, though we sometimes saved
knucks and jints.” This accounts for the scarcity of skeletons among the
first collections made. I saw to it that my party should care for every
bone discovered.
I realized then, that if we were to make our expedition a success, we
should have to climb where no one before us had dared to go. It was a
serious matter to scale those almost perpendicular heights; one took
one’s life in one’s hand in attempting it. They were, of course,
entirely bare of vegetation, and where the slope was not too steep, they
were covered with angular fragments of rock which rolled from under
one’s feet and were likely to send one flying into the gorge below. But
I laid the situation before my two men, explaining to them that unless
they were willing to face the danger, we should have to give up the
expedition, as we had explored the safe ground without results; and they
courageously agreed to follow where I led.
So every morning we started out for a day of perilous enterprise, each
with a collecting bag over his shoulder and a well-made pick in hand.
The latter was used not only for digging out fossils, but was absolutely
indispensable as an aid in climbing, and as an anchor in case we began
to slip. We were never sure when we left camp in the morning that we
should all meet there at night, since a single misstep on those cliffs
would mean death or worse than death on the pitiless rocks below; but
every day we gained confidence and grew more skilful in the use of our
picks.
Far above the pick-marks of the fossil hunters who had preceded us, far
above the signs of the mountain sheep that inhabited these wilds, we
made our way, cutting niches for our feet as high above us as we could
reach, and drawing ourselves up with bodies pressed to the rock. At each
niche we rested, and scanned the face of the cliff for the point of a
tooth or the end of a bone, or for one of those concretions, among the
thousands that everywhere topped the pinnacles or projected from the
rocky slopes, whose skull-shaped form revealed the treasure that was
hidden away within. When a fossil was found we first cut out of the face
of the cliff a place large enough to stand upon, and then carved out the
specimen.
I could tell of a hundred narrow escapes from death. One day I was
standing on a couple of oblong concretions, about a foot in length, with
a chasm, fifty feet deep and three or four feet wide, immediately in
front of me. After I had searched carefully the surface of all the rocks
in sight, I started to jump over to a narrow ledge on the other side of
the gorge. Suddenly both concretions flew from under my feet, and I was
plunging head downward into the gorge when by a violent struggle in
mid-air I managed to throw my elbows on the ledge; and I hung there
until I could find a foothold and pull myself out onto solid rock.
Another time I was climbing a steep slope which was capped by a
perpendicular ledge. I thought, however, that I could climb over it to
the top of a ridge that ran back into the hills, where I could find a
way down. For understand, we could never go back the way we had come, as
we could not relax our muscles sufficiently to enable us to find with
the tips of our toes the niches by which we had climbed up. So we had to
be sure that we could get to the top and find a way down from there. On
this occasion I was so busy searching the face of the rock for fossils
that I worked for hours, climbing up niche after niche, without noticing
very much where I was going, until chancing to look upward, I discovered
that an escarpment of the top ledge leaned over the slope that I was
scaling, rendering it impossible for me to reach the top. I fully
expected that I should have to cut out a place to sit in and wait until
the boys missed me and looked for me. They could then reach the top of
the ledge by some other way, and lower a rope to me. But I was delighted
to find at last a perpendicular seam in the rocky ledge, which proved
wide enough to admit my body. So I climbed to the top as a man climbs a
narrow well, with my back braced against one side and my feet planted
against the other.
But such experiences as these, instead of making us timid, only spurred
us on to more dangerous attempts. To show how reckless we became, I
remember that once Bill found a skull in a perpendicular cliff of
solidified volcanic mud, the termination of a ridge that ran far back
into the hills. The skull was located about twenty feet up the face of
the cliff, and too far below the surface of the ridge to be reached from
above; so that there was no way to get at it but by scaling the cliff. I
cut niches on one side, and Bill on the other, and we climbed up until
we could reach the specimen with our picks, clinging to a niche with one
hand and wielding the pick with the other. I worked with my right hand
and Bill with his left.
The rock was very hard, and it took a long while to hew out the
specimen. While we were at work, we heard a mountain sheep bleating for
her young. By reaching up we could get our hands over the edge of the
cliff, and pull ourselves up so that we could just peek over. Sure
enough, the sheep was coming down the ridge toward us in great
excitement, rending the air with calls for her lamb. I began to imitate
the bleat of her offspring, and she increased her speed toward us with
every sign of relief.
“What if she should butt us off?” I said to Bill, and the position we
were in, clinging to the face of the rock with our toes and fingers,
made the idea so inexpressibly funny that he began to laugh, louder and
louder the more I tried to hush him up. When I had led the sheep up to
within ten feet of us, she concluded that we were not her lost lamb, and
turning like a flash, started on a run for the mountains a mile away.
Out of a side canyon came the lamb, and fell in behind its mother; and
we could see the dirt flying out behind them until they appeared to be
about the size of a rabbit and a ground squirrel.
One day Bill and I were out together in the beds, and when we got back
to dinner, Jake did not show up. We were not much concerned about him,
as we concluded that he had found a specimen and was digging it out; but
when we came in at night and there was still no Jake, we made up our
minds that he had either fallen and killed himself or that he was lying
in some gulch with a broken limb. In great anxiety we started out into
the Bad Lands to find him.
It was a dangerous enough expedition in the daytime, but doubly so at
night, and we risked our lives many times; but we did not give up until
we had made the desolate region ring with our calls. At last, about
midnight, with fear and sorrow in our heart, we returned to camp. By the
moonlight I saw what appeared to be a human form in Jake’s bed. I rushed
to it and threw off the blankets, and there, sleeping peacefully, lay
Jake. We had a great mind to take him out into the Bad Lands and pitch
him off into a canyon. It seems that he had been to the mountains, three
miles away, where a small exposure of the John Day beds could be seen
from camp; and when he returned and we were not in, he had not worried
about us, but had eaten his supper and gone to bed, while we were making
ourselves hoarse shouting for him. This incident illustrates a
peculiarity of youth—its thoughtlessness as to the anxiety which it may
be causing its elders.
Among the fossil remains which we secured in these John Day beds, were
the limbs of a huge _Elotherium humerosum_, so named by Cope on account
of the great process on the humerus. We found the specimen in Haystack
Valley, lying on its side, with its toes sticking out of the face of a
slope. There were thousands of feet of volcanic rock above it. Following
in with pick and shovel, we cleaned up the floor, to find, when we
reached the center of the humeri and femora, that they had been cut
through as smoothly as if it had been done with a diamond saw. I knew,
of course, that there had been a fault here, and that the earth in
slipping down had severed the bones. The question that interested me was
which side had gone down and how far. If the side toward the open
valley, then the rest of the skeleton must have been destroyed by the
wash, as the slope above the bones lay at an angle of 45 degrees to the
floor on which they lay. If, on the other hand, the mountain side had
gone down, and the slip had not been too great, I should be able to find
the rest of the bones. Inspired by this hope, we put in several days of
hard work, and were delighted to find the severed bones three feet below
the original level.
What a shaking and trembling of the earth’s crust there must have been,
when miles of the mountain mass slipped down three feet toward the
center of the earth! No wonder that when a similar fault occurred at San
Francisco, the puny works of man fell in ruins. The bones of this
_Elotherium_ are now on exhibition in the American Museum, which
purchased the Cope collection, including the material that I secured
through eight seasons in the field in charge of his expedition.
I had found in the Cottonwood beds that lie on top of the John Day
Miocene the cannon-bone, or long cylindrical foot bone, of a large
camel. As I closely studied this bone, which is composed of opposite
halves, separated by a thin septum of bone in the center, with a
medullary canal on each side, the conviction came to me that the two
halves had once been distinct, like the metacarpals and metatarsals of
the pig. With this idea in mind, I was constantly looking for a camel in
the older beds, and I cannot express my delight when one day, as I was
exploring the John Day beds, I came across a skeleton which had been
weathered out and lay in bold relief on the face of a slope. I knew
before I picked up the cannon-bone that my belief was verified, and when
I took up the two bones separately, the fact was proved beyond a doubt
that in this ancestor of the living form the metacarpals of the fore
foot and the metatarsals of the hind foot were respectively distinct. As
the species represented by this specimen was new to science, Professor
Cope named it in my honor _Paratylopus sternbergi_. A skull of this
species was afterwards found by Dr. Wortman, and both specimens are now
on exhibition in the American Museum.
I arrived at this conclusion with regard to the cannon-bone of the
ancient camel as Darwin, Marsh, and Huxley arrived at the conclusion
that the ancient horse had three toes. They recognized that the splint
bones of the horse represented the side toes of rhinoceroses, one on
each side of the middle metacarpals and metatarsals respectively, and
they decided that they were the remnants of side toes in the ancestor of
the horse. And later we also found a three-toed horse.
I secured also in these beds the skull of a peccary and an oreodont,
both new, and used as the types of Cope’s description, and a couple of
carnivores; one, called by Cope _Archælurus debilis_, about the size of
the American panther, the other a dog about the size of a coyote. Cope
gave the name _Enhydrocyon stenocephalus_ to this genus and species. A
splendid skull of the rhinoceros _Diceratherium nanum_ Marsh, was
another of my discoveries here. All the specimens, with the skull of a
rodent from the same beds, are now on exhibition in the American Museum.
Of course these are but a few of the many specimens secured in these
beds; hundreds are stored away in the drawers and trays of the Museum. I
was told that it would cost twenty-five dollars to get a typewritten
copy of the list of John Day fossils in the Museum. In that list are
many specimens which my party secured or which I purchased from Warfield
and Day. Professor Cope once wrote me that my collection there
represented about fifty species of extinct mammals.
One day in July I left Jake Wortman in the field and started for
Dayville, leading a pack pony. I intended to stay all night with Mr.
Mascall, leave my load of fossils, and take back a load of provisions.
Bill Day had lost one of the horses, and as a large band of Umatilla
Indians was encamped on Fox Prairie at the summit of the mountains,
about six miles east of our camp in the Cove, he had gone off in that
direction to look for it.
When I reached the high mountain above Dayville, I could look down into
the narrow valley of the John Day. Although it was noon, there was no
smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses. The fields of wheat were
ripe for the cradle—they had no machines in that region, and not only
cradled their grain, but threshed it with horses, who tramped it out—but
no one was working in them, and there was no stock in the pastures. What
could it mean? I asked myself; and as I followed the long trail down to
the river, my heart was full of fearful forebodings. Had a pestilence
killed all these people whom I knew so well? Or had they all fled, with
their horses and cattle, from Indians on the warpath?
Without expecting to hear a response, I called, when I reached the
river, for Mr. Mascall to come over with his boat and take me across. To
my delight, I saw him come out of his house and take the trail down to
the boat through the woods that covered the first river bottom. All the
while that he was unlocking the boat and rowing across, I kept shouting,
“What’s the trouble? Where are all the people?” But not until I had got
aboard with my pack and saddle, and we had started back, would he answer
the questions which I had been asking myself ever since I left the top
of the mountain.
It seems that three hundred Bannocks, or Snakes, under their chosen
leader, Egan, had left the Malheur Agency, several hundred miles south,
and after stealing six thousand horses, mainly from the French brothers’
ranch, were now on their way north to join Homely, the chief of the
Umatillas, at Fox Prairie. General Howard, who was in hot pursuit, had
sent a courier ahead of his command to the settlers in the John Day
valley, advising them to gather at some central locality, build a
stockade, and take their women and children into it for protection from
the treacherous redskins. Everyone in the valley, except Mr. Mascall and
an old man who kept the mail station on Cottonwood Creek, a mile to the
south, had taken this advice and gone to Spanish Gulch, a mining town on
top of the mountains about ten miles southwest.
Near sundown Bill Day came in, having heard the news at the Indian camp.
He instantly insisted that we leave everything and go to Spanish Gulch.
It was foolish, he said, to risk our lives going back to warn Jake. On
the long trail up the mountain we should be in full sight of the South
Fork, down which the Indians were expected to come, and it would take us
half a day to climb those four thousand feet and hide ourselves in the
canyons on the other side. I refused, however, to be moved by his
arguments. I told him that I meant to go back, and that he was to go
with me. We could not leave Jake there in camp, entirely unconscious of
the fate that might be approaching him. He knew nothing of the proximity
of hostile Indians, and it was our duty to warn him.
“Well,” Bill said, “I am going to look out for number one. I have not
lost any Indians. If you have, go and hunt trouble. Let Jake look out
for himself.”
All my shells, perhaps three hundred, were empty, but I had plenty of
powder and lead, and the best long-range rifle I had ever owned, a heavy
Sharp’s weighing fourteen pounds, and shooting a hundred and twenty
grains of lead and seventy grains of powder. I set to work cleaning and
oiling it; and then spent the whole night in front of the fireplace,
melting lead, casting bullets, and loading shells. Bill also stayed
awake, and with his needle-gun kept guard at a porthole which commanded
a good view of the open ground around the house.
The next morning I started alone on my pony to follow the trail to the
Cove, where Jake, unconscious of danger, was at work in the fossil beds.
It seemed an interminable journey, and I thought that there was an
ambuscade behind every bush and pile of rocks that guarded the road.
But, greatly relieved, I got out of sight at last in the deep canyons on
the other side, and soon saw Jake’s pony near a fossil bed and found
Jake himself deeply interested in a splendid discovery he had made.
When I told him the news, he wanted to drop everything until the war was
over, and fly for safety to the stockade. But no; my tent, with many
fine fossils in it, was in an open valley in plain sight for miles, and
would quickly attract any marauding hostile, who might set fire to it
and destroy the work of months. I insisted, therefore, upon caching, the
Pacific coast term for hiding, everything. So we took down the tent, and
putting it, with the fossils and all the rest of the outfit, into a
secret place, we covered them with a big brush pile. Then I was ready to
fly as fast as our ponies could carry us.
When we reached the river, Bill was still with Mr. Mascall, and brought
over the boat. Then both men insisted that we go without further delay
to the Gulch, as we had risked our lives long enough. But there was a
large collection of valuable fossils in the log house behind Mr.
Mascall’s cabin, and as the specimens were wrapped in burlap, they would
be destroyed if the Indians burned down the house, which they would be
sure to do if they came. I had no boxes, but I had a quantity of new
lumber, which we had secured from a mill in the vicinity; so, refusing
to be moved, I took off my coat and went to work sawing up the lumber
and making boxes. The other men never let their guns leave their hands,
and kept guard all night, expecting every moment to hear the whoop of
the Indians.
By daylight I had every fossil neatly packed, each in a little box, and
then we all took hold, and carrying the boxes down to the first river
bottom, hid them under a great grapevine, which completely covered them.
After throwing dead leaves over our trail, I was satisfied that we had
done all that we could, and as we could not induce Mascall to abandon
his property, we left him and went over to the Gulch. We found nearly
all the settlers keeping house inside the stockade, which was built of
pine logs and covered enough ground to hold their teams, wagons, and
cattle, as well as themselves.
As I realized that it would be impossible for us to do any work in the
John Day beds, fearing every moment to be surprised by Indians, I
concluded that this would be a good time to go to the Dalles and try to
find out what had become of the collection of Fossil Lake material which
had been sent off the year before, and had been lost somewhere. I had a
receipt for the specimens from a Mr. French, who was, I supposed, the
agent for the Oregon Steam Navigation Company. His letterhead read
“Forwarding Agent for the O. S. N. Co.,” but I had repeatedly written to
the agent at the Dalles, and had received no answer, while Cope, from
his end of the line at Philadelphia, had sent tracers out over every
route he could think of, trying to locate the fossils.
A Mr. Wood, the owner of a large herd of horses, was driving the herd to
a point near the Dalles for protection from the Indians, and I joined
his party. But the several hundred horses raised such a volume of dust
that, after a few days of suffocation, I concluded that I might as well
lose my scalp as be choked to death, and leaving the herd, went on
alone. All along the way, men, women, and children were fleeing for
safety to the Dalles, and dozens of homes and ranches were being
deserted just at the time when the people should have been saving their
grain. I never in my life saw so much excitement and fear. As many white
men were fleeing for their lives as there were Indians on the warpath,
and every man of them was blaming General Howard for not having
exterminated the hostiles before they started.
I met the man who had hauled my Fossil Lake collection in to the Dalles,
and for the first time learned the truth about them. It seems that they
had never been shipped. Mr. French simply had a warehouse, and forwarded
goods by the Steam Navigation Company, and mine had been covered up in
the warehouse and entirely forgotten. I was in splendid spirits when I
knew that they were safe.
Having rescued this valuable material from the warehouse, I returned to
the Gulch without seeing an Indian, to find the people still in a state
of great excitement. General Howard had sent word that the men could put
themselves under the leadership of Colonel Bernard, each citizen
furnishing his own mount and arms, but receiving his rations from the
Government. I tried to raise a company of men to accept this offer, but
not a man cared to go. At last, heartily tired of staying in camp, I
asked for a volunteer to go with me to the John Day valley to find out
how Mr. Mascall and the old man at the stage station were getting on. No
one would go at first, but later Mr. Leander Davis, who was for many
years a fossil hunter for Professor Marsh, agreed to go with me; and
packing a horse with blankets and supplies, we started.
We were relieved to find both men well, and no sign of Indians.
Continuing our journey east, we crossed the south fork of the John Day,
and all doubts as to the movements of the Indians were removed. For a
wide trail, cut deeply into the dry soil by six thousand horses and the
three hundred Indians who were driving them north, led down the slope
and followed up the main fork on the Canyon City road.
As we sat on our horses, looking south along the heavy trail, we saw
some half-dozen horsemen coming toward us. We knew that they must have
seen us, and concluded to stay where we were until we could make them
out. Before long we saw the glitter of sabers and the flash of gold
buttons, and soon General Howard and his staff rode up at a gallop. I
recognized him by his brigadier general straps and by his empty sleeve.
He had lost an arm fighting to preserve the Union.
We saluted, and he asked me whether we had seen his pack train. When I
answered no, he asked me if we knew where he could find some bacon, as
he and his staff, as well as the troops behind them, had been living for
three days on fresh beef without any salt. I told him of a smokehouse
across the bridge, and he sent his scout to examine it. The man returned
shortly with the report that not only was the smokehouse full of bacon,
but that the table in the dwelling house was set for a meal, with cold
coffee in the cups, bread, cold bacon, and potatoes, all ready to eat.
The people had evidently just sat down to dinner when someone had rushed
in with the news that the Indians were coming, and they had all thrown
back their chairs and fled for their lives.
While the General and his staff sat down to a hearty meal, Leander and I
continued to follow the trail. At one place, where a farmer made cheese,
we found that a number of large cheeses had been taken out into the road
and rolled along for some distance with a stick. We followed up the
trail which they had made in the deep dust, and put one of them on our
pack. We went into one of the houses on the road, and found that the
Indians had broken up all the furniture, including the sewing-machine,
etc. In the front room they had poured out a barrel of molasses, spread
over it several sacks of flour, and stuck a little woolly dog in the
mixture. The poor little fellow was dead. A little farther on, a
sheepman’s house had been burned, and near by two thousand sheep had
been mutilated and thrown into piles to die. The herders were found
scalped a few days later. At one farmhouse a fine brood mare had been
killed because she could not keep up with the herd.
Some days later, on the twenty-ninth of July, I believe, there was a
total eclipse of the sun. The heavens were like brass, and there was a
peculiar condition of the atmosphere such as I have never experienced
before or since. A report was spread abroad that the Indians had
returned and burned all the farmhouses along the river. I was at the
time with Leander Davis, and we rode up to Perkins ranch, where a lot of
men had congregated and were taking turns standing guard for fear of the
Indians. When we rode up they were standing about, uncertain as to what
it all meant. The dogs had gone under the stoop and the chickens to
roost. The air was motionless, and an unusual stillness was over
everything. The men welcomed us in hushed voices.
I sprang from my horse and asked Perkins whether he had any pieces of
broken glass. He said that there were plenty under the west window, and
I went and got a supply, followed by all the men, who were greatly
relieved by my explanation of the phenomenon. We got a candle and
blackened the pieces of glass, and watched the progress of the eclipse
through them.
It had a more disquieting effect upon the hostile Indians. It seems that
the soldiers had cut them off from crossing the Columbia by capturing
all the small boats and patrolling the river night and day; so that with
Howard’s troops on the trail behind them, troops from Walla Walla on
their flanks, and the river in front, they were in a bad way. Moreover,
the French brothers and the governor of Oregon had offered a reward of
two thousand dollars for Egan’s head.
The Umatilla Indians were accused of pretending to help the whites in
the daytime, and really helping the Snakes at night. So the commander
sent out a party of soldiers to capture the squaws and little children
of Homely and the other chiefs and hold them as hostages for the good
behavior of their braves. When the latter asked the commander to release
their families, the answer was given that if they would capture Egan and
deliver him up to the authorities, they would not only get back their
wives and children, but would receive the two-thousand-dollar reward.
Otherwise their families would still be held as hostages.
It appeared that Egan had an appointment with Homely at a certain hour.
As he rode out from his camp, with a brave behind him, Homely, similarly
attended, went out to meet him. When they met between the two camps,
they turned at right angles and rode toward the point agreed upon for
the powwow. But as they were riding thus, side by side, Homely, with a
word to his brave, suddenly raised his rifle and shot Egan, while his
brave shot the attending Snake. They then immediately severed the heads
of the dead men, and riding back with them to the whites, claimed the
reward. About the same time, the eclipse came on, and the poor Snakes,
deprived of their leader, thought that the world was coming to an end,
and leaving their great herd of stolen horses, fled in small bands
toward the Malheur Reservation, and were all eventually captured.
The war thus ended, as soon as I could get things in shape and my party
together, I returned to the Cove, got my outfit and fossils, and moved
over into Haystack Valley. I remained there all winter, and the next
season secured another large collection. Many of the specimens in it are
described by Professor Cope in Vol. III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata.” On
p. xxvi and the two following pages of the preface, he pays his
collectors a high compliment, which I give myself the pleasure of
repeating here in his own words: “The same year [’77] I employed Charles
H. Sternberg to conduct an exploration of the Cretaceous and Tertiary
formations of Kansas. After a successful search, I sent Mr. Sternberg to
Oregon. The Tertiary formations explored in 1878 were the John Day and
Loup Fork of Oregon. The John Day formation was chiefly examined on the
John Day River and the Loup Fork beds at various points in the same
region. These yielded about fifty species, many of them represented in
an admirable state of preservation.”
After mentioning the work of his other explorers, he goes on to say:
“Mr. Sternberg’s expedition of 1878 was interrupted by the Bannock war,
and both himself and Mr. Wortman were compelled to leave their camp and
outfit in the field and fly to a place of safety on their horses. It is
evident that an enthusiastic devotion to science has actuated these
explorers of our western wilderness, financial considerations having
been but a secondary inducement. And I wish to remark that the courage
and disregard of physical comfort displayed by the gentlemen above
referred to are qualities of which their country may be proud, and are
worthy of the highest commendation and of imitation in every field.”
Before leaving this interesting field, I wish to show my readers Cope’s
figure of the great saber-toothed tiger, _Pogonodon platycopis_ (Fig.
31), which was secured in 1879 by Leander Davis. I do not remember who
first discovered the specimen, but for weeks each of us collectors,
Wortman, Davis, and I, tried to devise some means of securing it The
skull topped a pinnacle, perhaps thirty or forty feet high, and tapering
like the spire of a church. At the top it was only a foot in diameter.
We knew that it would not be strong enough to support the weight of a
ladder, and it was too steep to scale. Moreover, if we blew it up with
powder, the skull, whose rows of teeth seemed to grin at us defiantly,
would be shattered to bits.
[Illustration:
FIG. 29.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.)
Mascall Formation.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 30.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.)
Clarno Formation.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 31.—SKULL OF GREAT SABRE-TOOTHED TIGER, _Pogonodon platycopis_.
Discovered in John Day River, 1879, by Leander Davis. (After Coke.)
]
By whatever method it was secured, it represented a feat of the greatest
possible bravery, and Cope did only justice to Leander Davis in
publishing his understanding of the manner in which it was done. That
description is attached to the skull to-day, and thousands have read of
Davis’ heroic act in securing it for science. Professor Cope says that
he cut niches and climbed to the top of the spire. My remembrance,
however, is that he threw a rope around the spire and let it settle down
to where he thought the rock would be strong enough to support his
weight. He then climbed up hand over hand to the loop, stood erect,
picked up the skull, and without putting any pressure on the rock, got
back to his rope and down to safety below. He then secured the rope by
jerking off the top of the pinnacle.
It matters little how he got the skull, but I am ready to testify that
it was the bravest undertaking I ever saw accomplished in the John Day
beds; and as long as science lasts, this noble specimen of one of the
largest tigers that ever lived should be associated with the name of
Leander Davis. I am glad that the great dike across the Cove is named
after him also.
What is it that urges a man to risk his life in these precipitous fossil
beds? I can answer only for myself, but with me there were two motives,
the desire to add to human knowledge, which has been the great motive of
my life, and the hunting instinct, which is deeply planted in my heart.
Not the desire to destroy life, but to see it. The man whose love for
wild animals is most deeply developed is not he who ruthlessly takes
their lives, but he who follows them with the camera, studies them with
loving sympathy, and pictures them in their various haunts. It is thus
that I love creatures of other ages, and that I want to become
acquainted with them in their natural environments. They are never dead
to me; my imagination breathes life into “the valley of dry bones,” and
not only do the living forms of the animals stand before me, but the
countries which they inhabited rise for me through the mists of the
ages.
The mind fills with awe as it journeys back to those far-distant lands.
Stop, reader, and think! In this John Day region, ten thousand feet, or
nearly two miles, of sedimentary and volcanic rock lie above the
Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous, from which I dug last summer the
beautiful skull of a Kansas mosasaur, _Platecarpus coryphæus_, which
lies before me now, its glistening teeth as perfect as in the days when
they dripped with the blood of its victims. How many ages were those ten
thousand feet in building? How long has it taken the running water, with
its tools of sand and gravel, to carve out the Grande Coulée and the
river valley, and expose all the various formations, with their records
of the life of the past? And yet all this has taken place since my
mosasaur, which seems to watch me as I write, fought its last battle and
sank to rest beneath the waves of the Cretaceous sea.
CHAPTER VIII
MY FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE PERMIAN OF TEXAS, 1882
My first expedition to the Permian of Texas was made in 1882, while I
was in charge of collecting parties for the Museum of Comparative
Zoology of Harvard University.
I left the station at North Cambridge about the fifteenth of December,
and reached Dallas on the twenty-first, with the address of A. R.
Roessler; but I was told at the post-office that there was no such man
and no such address in the city. I had been depending absolutely upon
the information which I hoped to receive from this Mr. Roessler, as I
myself had no more idea as to the whereabouts of the Permian beds than a
new-born child. Dr. Hayden had written me to follow up Red River until I
found the red beds, which had colored the whole flood-plain of the
valley, and I had seen the red mud at Texarkana as I entered the state;
but it would take years to explore the whole valley of that great
stream. I felt that I had come upon a wild-goose chase, and I suppose
showed my dismay in my face, for the postmaster asked if he could help
me. I told him my troubles, and he said that there was a man in town, a
Professor W. A. Cummins, who had been Cope’s assistant the year before.
Greatly cheered, I went to the man’s house posthaste, to be met at the
door by his wife, who told me that the Professor was in Austin.
Whereupon my spirits dropped below zero again. But if a girl’s face is
her fortune, so is a man’s sometimes, for I gained Mrs. Cummins’
sympathy at once. When I told her why I had come to Texas, she answered,
“Why, I was with Professor Cummins on his expedition to the Permian
beds,” and proceeded to give me all the information which I thought
necessary.
I learned that they had made their headquarters at Seymour, in Baylor
County, between the Brazos and Wichita rivers, and I supposed that
anyone in Seymour could tell me the exact localities from which the
fossils came. Later I found to my sorrow that this was not the case; and
I wasted months of careful exploration over barren beds before I found
the horizon that yielded the wonderful batrachians and reptiles of which
I had come in search.
Much elated, I took the train for Gordon, a cattlemen’s town south of
Seymour, and the point nearest to it by rail. I arrived there on
Christmas Eve. I was the only passenger to leave the cars and was
welcomed by about twenty cowboys, who were just beginning to paint the
town red. The leader asked me where I came from, and I answered
promptly, “From Boston.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“To the best hotel in town,” said I.
“All right!” he said. “We’ll take you there.” And sure enough, they did.
They formed in double file and put me in the middle of their ranks. Then
the two men ahead of me laid their Winchesters over my shoulders from in
front, and the two men behind crossed these guns with their own, and at
the word, “Fire at will!” the whole command opened fire and kept it up
all the way to the hotel. There a girl appeared, carrying a lamp with no
chimney, and the men, facing the porch, allowed me to go into the
waiting room. I turned first, and made a little speech, thanking them
for their kind reception and remarking that if I were not so poor, I
should stand treat for the whole crowd. This satisfied them, and
shouting “All right!” they went off to continue their nonsense until
they were all drunk.
I hired the son of the hotel keeper, a Mr. Hamman, put my baggage in his
wagon, and started on the journey north to my headquarters at Seymour,
which we reached eight days later. Here I got off the track again, for
although everyone in town knew Professor Cummins, no one could tell
where he had found his fossils. “Over in the brakes,” was all the
information anyone could give. Finally a man named Turner asked me to
come over to his cattle range on the middle fork of the Wichita, as the
country was cut up into canyons and ridges and denuded, so that I should
be likely to find fossils. He knew of some mastodon bones in the
vicinity, he said. So I went with him.
At one place the road led us across the narrows, where there is scarcely
room for a wagon road between the brakes of the Brazos and the Big
Wichita. Looking south, shallow ravines led to the valley of the Brazos,
while to the north were deep gulches and mounds capped with white ledges
of gypsum with red beds of clay below. I had reached at last the red
beds of Texas.
An interesting phenomenon is to be observed here—the bed of the Big
Wichita is one hundred and seventy-five feet lower than that of the
Brazos. North of the Brazos, along a line that extends through Baylor
County, the country has been lifted up and disturbed by pressure from
below, while south of that line, the only disturbance in the strata has
been due to erosion. Everywhere in the red beds of the Wichita valley
are signs of an elevation of the earth’s crust, and for miles down the
stream one comes upon miniature mountains with the strata turned up at
all angles. The river valley occupies a fault.
Very beautiful indeed was the view when we got in sight of the brakes of
the Big Wichita. As far as the eye could see stretched miniature Bad
Lands, with rounded knobs, deep canyons, bluffs, and ravines. The
prevailing color of the strata was Indian red, but beds of white gypsum
and of greenish sandstone relieved the sameness. Sometimes seams of
gypsum filled cracks in the strata, forming dikes a few inches in
thickness.
Between the hills grew patches of grass, a welcome sight to our horses,
for we had passed through a country devoid of vegetation. The fall
before, the army worm had eaten the ground clean of everything that was
eatable. We pitched our camp near a ditch that had been cut through the
sediment which overspread the flood-plain.
The day after pitching camp, I heard George Hamman calling me, and
crossing the bridge, saw him beckoning me to follow him. He gathered his
pockets full of cobblestones as he went along, and when he reached the
edge of the ditch a little way below the crossing, he began to throw the
stones at something. I ran up to him, and heard the rattle of snakes,
but could not see any until, resting my hand on his shoulder, I lifted
myself on my toes and saw, on the other side of the ditch, a cave with a
broad floor. Lying singly or knotted together in gorgon spheres, with
heads sticking out in all directions, were hundreds of large
rattlesnakes, which had come out of the cracks in the earth to bask in
the sun on this sheltered floor. They had become terribly irritated by
the blows of the stones which Hamman was hurling at them, and were
rattling in chorus and striking out in all directions, biting themselves
and each other. Suddenly one rattled in the high grass at our very feet,
and looking down, we saw a big fellow making ready to strike. As quick
as a flash Hamman threw himself over backward, knocking me down, and the
instant he touched the ground, turned a complete somerset. While I lay
there, overcome with laughter, he turned two more, and finding himself
on the road, started for camp on a run. I was too hysterical with
laughter to help myself, and lay there, while the snake continued to
sound its rattle and dart out its forked tongue, swinging its head back
and forth above its coiled body. When George saw my predicament, he was
brave enough to come back and pull me out of reach of his lordship’s
fangs. Then we were mean enough to kill him. He measured five feet in
length.
[Illustration:
FIG. 32.—SKELETON OF FIN-BACKED LIZARD, _Naosaurus claviger_.
Collected by Charles Sternberg in the Permian Beds of the Big Wichita
Valley, Baylor Co., Texas, in the winter of 1896. By permission of
Prof. H. F. Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History.
(Photo. by Anderson)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 33.—FIN-BACKED LIZARD, _Naosaurus claviger_.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From model in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
The valley contained thousands of wild turkeys, and it was a fine sight
to see them come down in great droves from the hills at night to roost
in the trees below. On the level prairie there were many antelope, also;
and wild cats and coyotes were seen nearly every day. I remember one
day, when crossing a low level prairie covered with bushes a couple of
feet in height, seeing at my left a coyote which was running along in a
straight line, with its nose pointed toward a certain spot, like a
pointer dog after a prairie chicken. My interest was aroused, and to
increase my curiosity, I caught sight of a short-tailed cat, the
Canadian lynx, crawling along the ground in the same direction. I knew
that they were both trailing some prey which each, unknown to the other,
had scented, and imagining that it might be a calf, I shouted, as I did
not want to see it torn to pieces. This startled the cat, and drove her
off at a tangent to her trail. The coyote continued his course, but did
not stop, for a Texas cow had run to the point toward which he was
traveling, and stood with lowered horns, ready to repel his assault;
while her calf sprang up and deliberately proceeded to take advantage of
the situation to get his dinner.
In this region, as in the Kansas chalk beds, the question of water gave
us a great deal of trouble. All the water in the river is that which
goes by the name of alkali in the West, being thoroughly impregnated
with salt and other mineral ingredients. There are, moreover, no wells
or springs in the red beds. The surface rock is porous, and the water
sinks through it to the compact gray beds below, from which it drains
off into the river. These gray beds are some distance below the surface,
and so far as I know, have never been reached in digging for water. One
is, therefore, forced to depend upon rain water. This is collected
either in artificial tanks built by the cattlemen, or in natural tanks,
sometimes along the creek beds, but usually in the flood-plain in old
creek beds, where the fine red mud has been puddled by cattle, perhaps,
or in the olden days, by buffalo. These ponds hold water for years,
although often they become very foul from the cattle that frequent and
wade into them in summer to get away from the flies.
It is an odd sight to a stranger in the valley of the Big Wichita to see
the rain come rushing down the hills. It soon becomes as thick as cream
with the fine red clay, and to think of depending upon such water for
drinking and cooking purposes is revolting to one who remembers the
sparkling springs and clear wells of the East or any mountainous
country. During quiet days, when the wind was not blowing, the red mud
would settle in the bottom of the tanks, but one had to be careful not
to pull out one’s pail suddenly or the water would instantly thicken
with mud from the bottom.
Nothing would settle this water but boiling it, although it might be
cleared a little by the pulp of cactus leaves. I have sometimes gone to
the trouble of peeling the broad leaves of the prickly pear and beating
them into a mucilaginous pulp to throw into a pail of muddy water. The
mud attached itself to this material and sank with it to the bottom; but
even then the clarified liquid remaining on top did not make a very
tempting drink. I soon got used to the thick red water, however, as had
the other inhabitants of the country, and for six seasons drank it
thankfully, when I was thirsty. When a man is thirsty, he drinks first
and tastes the water afterwards. I once asked an old cowman what he did
for drinking water on the range, and he answered, “Wherever and whatever
a cow can drink, I can.” And cows will take filthy water, if they can
get no other.
All that winter I worked in these desolate beds, walking over thousands
of acres of denuded rock, searching without success for the fossil
fields. The dominant color of these beds is red, but the tints vary so
that the eye is dazzled and wearied by the constant change. There are
countless concretions too, all of which had to be looked over. If fine
specimens had rewarded the labor, all would have been well, but I know
of no work more trying than spending day after day in a fruitless
search.
At last Hamman, having fattened his horses on two-dollar corn, started a
quarrel with me, so that he might have an excuse for deserting me, and
drove off with the team, which I had hired for some time longer, leaving
me alone, thirty miles from town. Fortunately, however, I found a good,
honest Irishman, Pat Whelan by name, who became not only a splendid
assistant, but a true friend. Poor fellow! I learned a few years ago
that he had frozen to death in Montana.
One warm, sultry day I sent him in to town for provisions. I had no tent
at that time, but he left me the wagon sheet, and I had camped on the
south side of a large tree, which was so effectually covered with green
briers as to be an almost impenetrable defense against the north wind.
I was in the field after Mr. Whelan left me, and noticing the Texas
cattle coming from the prairie to the heavy timber, I concluded,
although there was not a cloud in sight, that they had scented a
norther. Rushing to camp, I began rapidly to make preparations for the
storm. First I cut a couple of crotches and sank them well into the
ground on the south side of the brier-covered tree. Then I put up a
ridgepole and stretched over it the wagon sheet, which I fastened
securely to the ground on either side. I also heaped dirt on the edges,
to keep out the snow. I thus had a dog tent, opening toward the northern
barrier and toward the south.
There was plenty of fallen wood lying about, and I devoted every moment
and all my strength to cutting it up and dragging it to the tent. I must
have got several cords together before I heard the wind howling in the
heavy timber to the north. I piled up this supply of fuel at the opening
toward the green brier thicket, and built a big fire at the mouth of the
tent.
Soon an awful storm was upon me, all alone, thirty miles from any human
habitation. How the wind moaned through the creaking branches! A dense
darkness spread like a pall over the heavens, and the shrieks and wails
of the tempest echoed through the woods like the cries of lost souls.
Then snow and sleet began to fall in fitful gusts, and beat upon the
thin canvas that was my only shelter. At such a time a man loses much of
his confidence in himself. Pretty small I felt myself when measured with
that storm, which bent the great cottonwoods and elms like reeds before
it.
After supper, tired out with my unwonted exertions, I fell asleep.
Whenever the fire sank down and the cold became severe, I roused myself
and piled fresh fuel on the dying embers, and when they blazed up again,
dropped off once more. Three days and three nights that norther lasted.
I understood then why the people of the Southland speak of them as they
do and dread their coming. I never once left my shelter until it
cleared.
Poor Pat Whelan! He had lost his horses in the storm, and being sure
that I would freeze to death if he could not get back to me, he had
spent every hour of daylight looking for them. What he must have
suffered in that awful gale, while I was safe and comfortable!
My readers would grow weary if I told the whole story of that winter’s
search. There were so few results that I became thoroughly disheartened
and anxious to give up the fight and go home, where my wife and dear
baby were waiting for me. There was further cause for discouragement in
the fact that Pat had only agreed to stay with me until spring plowing
began, and the time for that was rapidly approaching. But I would not
give up. So we worked on down the stream toward the Fort Sill cattle
trail, traveling on an average twenty miles a day on foot, with the
record “Nothing” in my notebook night after night.
But on the eleventh of February, after forty days of unceasing effort, I
discovered below the forks of the Big Wichita a somewhat different
horizon from that of the beds over which I had been working so
persistently without success. Some of the beds in this region are
composed of red clay, with small irregular concretions that are piled in
heaps at the base of the hills and roll under one’s feet, rendering
travel difficult In other strata are deposits of small nodules, held
together by silica. These nodules are of various colors, and where held
securely and ground down, make beautiful mosaics. Then there are beds of
greenish sandstone, laid down in thin layers; and in these beds, for the
first time since I came to Texas, I found the remains of a Permian
vertebrate. My notes say: “Although it is not wise to shout before I am
out of the woods, yet I feel very much encouraged, and I earnestly hope
for the success I have worked for. I have evidently worked too high in
the red beds to find fossils.”
On the second day in these beds, I found fragments of the great
salamander _Eryops_, and on the twenty-second of February, I found the
first specimen that I had ever seen of the long-spined reptile,
_Dimetredon_. Of this last I got seventy-five pounds of bones and
matrix, preserved in iron ore concretions. The teeth are long, recurved,
and serrated. I knew little then about these most ancient of all the
vertebrates that it has been my fortune to collect, but I shall have
more to say about them later. The authorities now place the time when
these animals lived twelve million years away. Indeed, “God is not slack
as some men count slackness, one day is with the Lord as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day.”
The only way in which we can realize the lapse of millions of years is
by a study of the work which nature has accomplished in them, depositing
vast strata, lifting them up into mountain ranges, and carving out in
them flood-plains and mighty canyons. More interesting still is a study
of the countless forms of life which, in ever-varying groups, have each
in turn dominated sea and earth and air. First, as here in Texas, the
batrachians reigned supreme, a race of creatures which were supplied
with both gills and lungs, so that they could live both on land and in
water. Then came the reptiles, and later still dawned the Age of
Mammals, with man as the crowning work of the Creator’s hands.
I was now at last in the fossiliferous beds and secured some fine
material. Unfortunately about this time Pat gave notice that he would
soon be obliged to leave me. I should then have no team, and to work in
these fossil beds without a means of transportation would be as useless
as to attempt to dig up a forest with a hoe. I had, however, sent north
for an assistant, a Mr. Wright, and after hunting for me a day and a
half in the brakes of the Big Wichita, he finally arrived in camp.
On the sixth of March a violent norther struck us. We were better off
for protection than we had been, however, as my tent had at last arrived
from Kansas; and although only an A-tent, it kept out the storms of
sleet and snow that fell for three days. During all that time the cattle
remained without food in the dense woods. Such times as this, when we
were confined to the close quarters of our tent and could accomplish
nothing but keeping ourselves warm, are in my opinion the most
uncomfortable which the fossil hunter is called upon to endure.
On the ninth of March, the sun rose bright and clear upon a scene of
surprising beauty. Every tree, bush, and blade of grass on the red beds
was covered with a milky white ice, whose silvery luster was set with
innumerable sparkling gems. It was glorious at sunrise, but as the
morning advanced, the snow and ice began to melt, leaving patches of red
and white over the Bad Lands, and by noon had entirely disappeared. The
hills rapidly dried, as the thick red water sought the drainage canals,
and we were soon at work once more.
As a precaution against the very difficulty which I had encountered,—I
mean the impossibility of keeping a man and team with me,—I had obtained
from the Secretary of War, through the efforts of Professor Alexander
Agassiz, a letter of introduction to the commanders of western posts,
requesting them to assist me by every means in their power not
inconsistent with the public service. With this letter from the
Honorable Robert T. Lincoln, a son of our martyred President, I started
out on the twelfth of March for Fort Sill, on a pony hired from a livery
stable. I was assured that it was only sixty miles to the Fort, and that
the pony could easily take me there in a day, but I soon found that he
was just off grass, and weak and thin. I also discovered, after night
had overtaken me, that I had been put on the wrong cattle trail. I
reached a house in the evening, that of a school-teacher, who, because
of his having had some education and possessing the ability to talk
intelligently, was known in that region as “Windy” Turner, in
distinction from “Bull” Turner, a cowman. I found him to be a gentleman.
The next morning he gave me directions as to how to reach the old trail
that led to the Fort. I was to go to Wagoner’s cattle camp, where the
trail crossed Beaver Creek, and spend the night there. I traveled nearly
all day, and reached the ranch building, the only house I had seen since
I left the school-teacher’s, only to find the camp deserted. Not a man
nor a cow was in sight. As I had had no lunch, I was very hungry, and
this being my first visit to this region, I did not know where to turn
for food and shelter. At last, however, I saw a horseman coming toward
me from the northeast, and rode to meet him. He was a cowboy. I inquired
where Wagoner had gone, and learned that he had left a few days before
for the Indian Territory. I was told, moreover, that the nearest place
at which I could get a meal was back on Coffee Creek, which I had left
in the morning. When I complained of being cold and hungry and of not
liking to sleep in my saddle blanket on the ground without supper, the
cowboy replied that he had not had a morsel to eat for three days and
that he had slept for three nights in his saddle blanket. After that I
said no more.
I was unwilling to return all the way back to the hospitable roof that
had sheltered me the night before, and continued my journey, with no
expectation of coming upon a human habitation until I reached Red River
the next night. It is hard to express my delight, therefore, when, upon
reaching the divide between Beaver Creek and Red River, I saw a lot of
tents, some distance to the right of the trail. I hurried to the
encampment, and found that it belonged to the locating engineer of the
Denver and Fort Worth Railroad. When I told the young man from whom I
had obtained this information that I wanted to see the engineer, he
grinned (I was not a very pleasant-looking individual, covered as I was
with the dust of travel), but he opened the door of the tent and said,
“Here’s a man who wants to see you.”
As the occupant of the tent came forward, I presented to him my letter
of introduction from the Secretary of War; and I saw the grin disappear
from the face of my guide as the engineer shook hands with me cordially,
and remarking, “That is a good enough letter of introduction for me,”
placed himself at my service. When I told him that my pony and I were
hungry, he instructed the man who had expected to see me refused the
courtesies of the camp to get up a good supper for me and to care for my
pony. Then, inviting me to make myself at home, he entertained me
royally, and after I had made a hearty meal, opened a bale of new woolen
blankets, and provided me with a most comfortable bed in his own tent. I
hope if Major J. F. Menette sees this story, he will accept at this late
day my thanks for his kindly treatment.
The next night I reached the crossing on Red River, where I found a
house and stayed all night. The next day, about nightfall I crossed Cach
Creek, and saw at my right, in a bend of the creek, an elevated “bench”
on which a tepee was pitched. There were two Indians standing about, one
a large, fleshy, good-natured man, the other thin, with large, prominent
cheek bones, a typical Comanche. A large flock of children ran out to
greet me. I must confess that I felt a little uneasy at being so
entirely alone and at the mercy of these Indians, but I made the best of
it, and as several turkeys were lying on the ground, I told the
good-natured man that I wanted his squaw to cook me one for supper. This
she proceeded to do, removing the breast and putting it on a wooden spit
which she stuck in the ground before a large bed of coals and constantly
turned until the meat was done. This, with a cup of coffee which she
made me and the bread crumbs from my lunch, gave me quite a meal. I was
too hungry to be fastidious.
The Indians were roasting camus, the bulb of the wild hyacinth, which
grew plentifully in the creek bottom. They had dug a pit five feet deep
and three in diameter and kindled a fire at the bottom, using at least a
cord of wood to heat thoroughly the surrounding ground. The ashes were
then scraped out, and the walls plastered with a mortar of mud, over
which green grass was thickly strewn to prevent the bulbs from burning.
The bulbs were then put in and covered with grass and mud, and a fire
built on top of them. The next morning they were done, and were as much
relished by these Indian children as popcorn or peanuts by the whites. I
tasted some. They had a sweetish taste, a little like sweet potatoes,
but they were so full of sand that my teeth were not strong enough to
grind them up.
I put off going to bed until late, as I dreaded sleeping in the high
grass where I had left my saddle. But at last the children, who had been
amusing me, went off to bed, and I decided to go too. I spread half my
saddle blanket under me, and with my saddle for a pillow was just dozing
off when I heard a rustle in the dead grass, and the thin Indian, whom I
disliked, stuck his head almost into my face. He had something in his
hands which he wanted to swap with me for some of my property, and the
more I argued, the more determined he was to trade. He wanted my pony,
my Winchester, everything I had, and I was afraid that he would take
them whether or no. At last, however, he left, crawling through the
grass as he had come; but I was just dropping off to sleep, when I heard
the snake-like rustle again. I was getting mad by that time, and when
the Indian parted the tall grass and peered through the opening, he
faced the muzzle of my gun, while I told him with much vehemence that if
he did not go about his business and let me get to sleep, I would bore a
hole through him. This had the desired effect, and but for the cold,
which wakened me often, I slept in peace the rest of the night.
I was wakened in the morning by a shot, and a wild turkey fell from a
tree near where I had been sleeping. They were so tame and abundant that
they roosted in camp. The jolly Indian was anxious to earn another
quarter, and as I had ordered turkey for supper, he had concluded that I
wanted one for breakfast. I was not quite so hungry this morning, and
detected the Indian smell which is left on everything they touch; but I
made a brave attempt not to show my disgust to my host.
After breakfast, as I started out for the trail, a boy of fourteen
walked down with me and stood talking, with his hands tangled in my
pony’s mane. I had given him some tobacco, and he was smoking a
cigarette which he had made with a dry leaf. At our feet the path
divided and encircled a little mound of earth covered with buffalo
grass. When the boy had finished his smoke, he threw the still burning
stump into this dead grass, which was damp with dew and sent up a dense
column of smoke. This was all done so naturally that I thought nothing
of it until I got up on the level prairie, where I could see for miles
ahead. As far as the eye could reach, column after column of smoke was
rising through the still morning air. It was thirty miles from the
crossing at Cach Creek to Fort Sill, yet when I presented my letter to
Major Guy Henry in the office at nine o’clock the next morning, the
first question he asked was “Did you leave the crossing at Cach Creek
about sunrise yesterday morning?” And when I answered that I had, he
said that probably about ten or fifteen minutes after I left the creek,
the Comanche chief had received notice by smoke signal that one man was
coming over the trail toward the Fort.
In coming to Fort Sill, I had inadvertently come from one department
into another, and the major had no power to send men out of his
department without orders from General Sheridan, the commanding general
of the Army. So I had to wait at Fort Sill until the matter could be
arranged.
The southern cowboys, who hated the army blue and the darky soldiers who
were stationed at the Fort, were doing all that they could to irritate
the officers. While the latter were at dinner and the soldiers off duty,
a squad of cowboys would ride into the post across the well-kept grass
on the parade grounds up to the flagstaff, and fire at the Stars and
Stripes. Another of their tricks was to shoot off the glass insulators
from the government telegraph lines which connect the Fort with the
headquarters at Leavenworth and with the Department of the Gulf. They
had just accomplished this piece of mischief when I arrived at the Fort,
and before the major could communicate with General Pope, Commander of
the Department of the Missouri, in which Fort Sill was situated, he had
to send out the signal sergeant to repair the line.
At last, however, all was arranged, and by general order, Corporal
Bromfield, three privates, a six-mule team, and a wagon with a white
teamster, and fifty days’ rations, were detailed for my use. I started
out with this escort, elated by the knowledge that I now had men and
means of transportation upon which I could depend.
It is indeed a lovely drive from Fort Sill to Red River. We were rarely
out of sight of the impressive Wichita Mountains, which rise from a sea
of green plains like an islet in a lake. We reached the river on the
second day, and had a mile of sand to pull through. At one time I
thought that we would go down in the treacherous quicksands, but our
magnificent team of dark-colored mules and the skill of the teamster
carried us safely over. I have since seen, in the sands of this same
river, holes ten feet deep which had been dug to rescue wagons loaded
with valuable goods, that had sunk down to bedrock during high water.
When we reached the beds of the Big Wichita, we worked both Indian and
Coffee creeks, a few miles apart. Here at last, after so much toil and
so many hardships, I found myself in the very center of the
fossil-bearing strata, and secured a number of fine specimens, among
them the great salamander _Eryops_, the wonderful fin-backed lizard
_Naosaurus_, that peculiar batrachian _Diplocaulus_, and other forms.
On arriving at the fossil beds, I showed Corporal Bromfield where I
wanted him to pitch my wall tent, and went into the field with Mr.
Wright, in search of fossils. When I returned at night, I found that the
corporal had pitched my tent on a level and his own A-tent as close to
it as he possibly could. “This will never do,” I said to myself.
“Discipline will go to the dogs, if I allow such close companionship.”
So I ordered him to take down his tent and pitch it a hundred yards
away, and to follow this rule in future. The soldiers were very
indignant, but they obeyed orders. As a general rule I found that I
could handle them, although there were a few breaches of discipline.
I was so unfortunate on this expedition as to have my tent burned, with
nearly all my personal property. When the men got to the flaming tent,
the first thing they did was to cut the guy-ropes and let it blow over.
They then, at my request, brought water and threw it on the burning
sacks that held the fossils. This saved the fossils, but to do so we had
to let everything else go.
On the twenty-fifth of April, we started with our load for Decatur, the
nearest railroad point. We took the Henrietta road, and camped on the
Little Wichita, where, in the sandy shales of the Upper Carboniferous or
Permian, we found a locality rich in the fossil flora of that region. We
secured a number of large fern fronds, etc.
Wild turkey were, as usual, abundant. Lee Irving, one of the escort,
killed a hen and gobbler, and gave us a change from our customary diet
of bacon. On the fourth of May, after a long journey, we plowed through
the valley named, and well named, the Big Sandy, and passing through
groves of splendid live oaks, pecans, water elms, and locusts, reached
Decatur, the terminus of the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. Here I
delivered to the agent my precious load of fossils, which had cost me so
much expense, labor, and anxiety, and set out on the return trip to Fort
Sill; where, on the twelfth of May, after a journey without incident, I
turned over my command to Major Henry. The next time I heard of this
splendid officer, he was a brigadier general in command of Porto Rico.
CHAPTER IX
EXPEDITIONS IN THE TEXAS PERMIAN FOR PROFESSOR COPE, 1895, 1897
In the summer of 1895, sixteen years after my last expedition for
Professor Cope, I was employed by him to make further explorations in
the brakes of the Big Wichita. My assistant and cook was a farmer, Frank
Galyean by name, who lived on Coffee Creek on the Vernon road,
twenty-five miles north of Seymour. I camped a mile above his house on
the west branch of the creek at Willow Springs, a favorite camping
ground, as it was one of the few places in which water was always to be
found. To the west rose Table Mountain, a hill several hundred feet
high, and mountains of the same height extended in a southwesterly
direction to Indian Creek, about four miles from camp.
I worked for several weeks on Indian Creek and Coffee Creek with very
poor returns, but on the nineteenth of September, Mr. Galyean, who was
of a sanguine temperament, announced that he had discovered the complete
skeleton of a huge beast. So, filled with high ropes, I followed his
lead along the rough face of the mountains, until at last, when we were
completely exhausted by the ruggedness of the way, he pointed out a pile
of the weathered and broken bones of a species so common that they were
not worth picking up.
Dropping in a moment from my hill of expectancy into a slough of
despond, I turned homeward, Mr. Galyean, who was as disappointed as I
was, leading the way to a short cut through a gap in the mountains. As
he got on the trail, which had been made by animals on their way to the
spring, he stooped and picked up something, remarking, “Why, here’s a
bone!” I took it, and was astonished to find it a complete skull,
covered with a hard siliceous matrix from a heavy bed of Indian red
clay, which was completely covered with concretions. I had never
carefully explored this horizon, as I had taken it for granted that it
was barren. And I suppose that other collectors had imagined the same,
for although it was within a mile of Willow Springs, where Boll and
Cummins and other collectors had camped through a series of years, I was
the first to discover this deposit of extinct animals.
We followed the trail over a slight rise into an amphitheater a couple
of acres in extent, and then over a higher rise into another, a little
larger, carved out of the mountain side and entirely denuded of soil.
These two amphitheaters proved to be the richest fossil beds I ever
discovered in the Permian of Texas. I quote the following entry from my
notebook regarding this discovery: “After finding the perfect skull
discovered by Galyean, we at once got into the richest ground I have
ever seen in these beds. I got a perfect skull, and Galyean another. We
have worked too low, it seems. This rich bone bed is on top of the beds
I have been working, at the heads of the ravines that cut into the face
of the mountains. The concretions in which the bones are preserved are
in red clay, and are of greenish and other colors.”
In my excitement over this rich find, I forgot my disgust with Galyean
for leading me on a wild-goose chase, forgot how tired I was, forgot my
dinner, forgot everything, and set to work at once collecting skulls and
bones. I remember that I filled my collecting bag with seventy-five
pounds of skulls, from less than an inch to over eight inches in length,
and all new to me and to science. This load I started to carry down the
steep trail to camp, a mile away. The good-natured Galyean, when he saw
me tottering under the load, offered to relieve me of my burden, but I
answered with such vehemence that no one should touch it, that I would
break my back first, that it was more precious than its weight in gold,
that he gave it up and fled down the mountains to camp, so that he might
at least have a warm meal waiting for me when I arrived.
How can any man who has not had the experience himself, realize the
glory of my triumphal march down that rugged trail? Not Nebuchadnezzar,
when his chariot headed the army that was carrying away the treasures of
the Lord’s house from Jerusalem, with the king of Judah, blinded and
bound in shackles of brass, in his train, could have known a prouder joy
than I did now over this discovery of a new region, in the very heart of
the old, which promised so rich a harvest of rare fossil remains. This
is an instance of an experience which has been very common in my
life—when I have been most completely hopeless and discouraged, I have
made my greatest discoveries.
Of the remarkable batrachians and lizards which twelve million years ago
peopled the estuaries and bayous of the Permian ocean shores, I found,
during that three months’ expedition, forty-five complete or nearly
complete skulls, many of them with more or less perfect parts of the
skeletons attached, and forty-seven fragmentary skulls, ranging in size
from less than half an inch to two feet in length; the whole collection
containing one hundred and eighty-three specimens of the extinct life of
the Texan Permian. The American Museum, which secured this splendid
material, was unable to describe and publish it then, while the results
of my famous expedition to these beds in 1901 for the Royal Museum of
Munich were at once described by Dr. Broili. Consequently the American
Museum lost much of the glory which attaches to the description of new
material. However, the Permian collection in the American Museum is now
being worked out with results of great importance to science.
Encouraged by my success on this expedition, I set out with high hopes
on January twentieth of the following year to continue my work for
Professor Cope in these beds. On reaching my headquarters at Seymour, I
succeeded in hiring an old man with a team and wagon, and on the
twenty-fifth of January, I made my first camp on Bushy Creek, ten miles
north of Seymour.
Three days later I found what I believed promised to be a fine specimen
of the ladder-spined reptile, _Naosaurus_, called fin-backed by Cope. A
number of perfect spines were exposed, presenting the possibility of
securing a complete specimen. I worked very carefully over this
skeleton, hoping to take it out whole and in good shape. It lay in red
and white sandstone, which easily disintegrated on the surface into
shale-like flakes. The spines and transverse projections, which
terminate in rounded knobs, were all broken _in situ_, and were also
flexed and tilted with the strata, so that great care was necessary in
following them. They were about three inches apart. I numbered the
spines 1, 2, 3, etc., not with reference to their natural position, but
to the order in which I came to them. A good many of the rounded ends of
the lateral spines were missing, having been washed down the slope. I
hoped to find them later.
As I studied these remarkable spines, many of them, near the center of
the body, three feet high, with the lateral spines alternating or
opposite, I instinctively called the creature the ladder-spined reptile;
and I cannot see how Professor Cope could have imagined that these
spines had any resemblance to the mast and yard-arms of a vessel, and
that there was a thin membrane stretched between them which caught the
breeze and acted as a sail. Later discoveries show it to be a land
animal. Professor Osborn’s magnificent restoration of the _Naosaurus_ is
shown. (Fig. 33.)
As I have said, it was a long and trying task to take up the skeleton,
as it was in thousands of fragments. If I had dug them up as one would
dig potatoes, no one would ever have had the patience to put them
together again. So I took up each spine in sections, wrapping say fifty
fragments together, and numbering them No. 1, spine 1, package 1, etc.;
so that when the whole collection came to be put together, the sections
could be mended separately first and then joined to one another.
The broken condition in which I found the skeleton prevented me from
realizing then how complete and valuable it was; but as I look now at
the fine photograph of the mounted specimen,—the only mounted specimen
of the _Naosaurus_ in the world (Fig. 32), I can see that this
expedition was indeed a success, in spite of the discouragement which I
went through at the time.
After the discovery of the _Naosaurus_, I was obliged to spend weeks of
work without results, growing more and more disheartened because I
myself was fully persuaded that the search was useless. Professor Cope
was convinced that there was a fossil-bearing stratum between the
Permian and Triassic, which would yield an entirely new fauna, and he
had reasoned out that this ideal bed must be located northwest of the
productive bed already known, in the very region, in fact, which I had
gone over with such care for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of
Harvard in 1882, and found barren. I, therefore, protested as strongly
as I could against making the trip; but he insisted, and his more
powerful will won the day. So I was forced to spend a month of extremely
trying labor at the head of Crooked Creek and in the other creek
valleys, northwest of the productive beds.
Here were thousands of acres of denuded bluffs of red clay, cut into
fantastic shapes, often resembling old fashioned straw bee-hives or
crumbling towers and battlements. As far as the eye could reach, they
spread out along the divide in ever-varying shapes. The beds
disintegrated easily into red mud. There were no concretions, although
the rock was full of concentric rings, from the sixteenth of an inch to
an inch in diameter, consisting of a round white spot with a red rim.
The narrow dikes which cross the thick deposits of clay are filled with
fibrous gypsum. Underneath the clay lie strata of red and white
sandstone and compact concretionary rock, all barren.
But the discouragement which attended my unsuccessful search was only
one of the trials with which I had to contend that winter. In the first
place, the weather was against me. It snowed or rained continually, so
that the ground was never dry, and I took up ten or fifteen pounds of
red mud on each foot as I walked. I came down with a severe attack of
grippe, too; and to make matters worse, my teamster, who was also my
cook, took a particular dislike to my stove, which had been manufactured
under my own supervision and had always proved satisfactory with other
men, and insisted upon doing all his cooking in a trench outside the
tent, so that I lost the heat which I might have had but for his
obstinacy.
Every morning I climbed out of bed with aching bones, and started on my
long tramp. At first I would hardly be able to drag myself along, but
gradually, as I warmed to the work, I would move faster, until usually I
got so far away from camp that I should not have been able to return for
dinner without taking more time than I could afford, and so went without
that meal. After working as long as I could see, I would return to my
uncomfortable camp, to go through the same performance on the following
day. I had suffered from fever and ague in the fossil fields of Kansas,
and had supposed that it would be impossible to suffer more, but I found
the grippe even more relentless than the ague.
To add to my worries, the people at my post office had taken in a family
with a malignant form of sore eyes, and although I supplied them with
curatives, they would get careless. The peevish old man whom I had
employed gave me a great deal of trouble too, at one time threatening to
leave me alone in the brakes. In general, my experiences with hired men
have taught me the advisability of owning my own outfit, whenever it is
possible. A hired man knows how helpless one is in the fossil fields
without transportation, and takes advantage of the power which that
helplessness gives him; or he looks at things from the hired man’s point
of view, and if he can better his wages by leaving his employer, thinks
that he has a perfect right to do so, even if he has made a contract to
remain.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
After working for weeks in accordance with Cope’s instructions, although
it was as useless as carrying bricks from one side of a yard to the
other and back again, I returned, worn and discouraged, to the beds
which produced at least a few fossils. I determined, moreover, to give
up the field at the end of my contract, and go home, and wrote a
despondent letter to Cope, asking to be relieved when the contract
expired, as I needed rest. It was then that I received the letter which
I publish here in facsimile, a letter which I shall always cherish, not
only because it shows the very best side of Cope’s character, but
because it makes me feel that he realized that my life work could not be
measured by money. It gave me at the time the kind of encouragement
which I needed more than any other, and on receipt of it, although I was
just ready to give up from exhaustion and homesickness, I decided to
remain another month in those barren fields. Cope promised that he would
never again send me into a field against my own judgment; and by having
my own way again, I was so fortunate as to add many new specimens to the
collection.
For I was rewarded, as I have always in my life been rewarded, for my
many days of fruitless toil, by the discovery of a long stretch of beds
whose brilliant metallic color, the result of a large amount of iron
accumulated by a dank and luxurious vegetation, testified that they had
once formed the mud at the bottom of a bayou. This old swamp proved to
have been the habitat of countless salamanders, and thanks to this
discovery I accomplished more during the last month of my stay in Texas
than during all the rest of the time put together, leaving out of
account, of course, the fin-backed lizard.
I take pleasure in showing my readers a splendid skull (Fig. 34) after
Broili, both the palatine and superior exposures of one peculiar species
of these salamanders, to which Cope gave the name _Diplocaulus
magnicornis_. The eyes are far down on the face, but with a broad
expanse of sculptured bone behind, terminating in two long “horns,”
fourteen inches across from tip to tip, which are merely the greatly
prolonged corners of the back of the skull. There are three rows of
minute teeth in the roof of the mouth, and a couple of occipital
condyles. The vertebræ have a double row of spines down each side of the
median line, and the body is long and slender with weak limbs. The head
was the largest part of the creature. This species was the most common
of all those which I discovered in the Permian beds. Professor Cope used
to call the specimens “mud heads,” as they were almost always covered
with a thin coating of silicified mud, which was very difficult to
remove. In fact, nearly all the bones in this region were enclosed in a
hard red matrix.
[Illustration:
FIG. 34.—FOSSIL SKULL OF GIANT SALAMANDER, _Diplocaulus magnicornis_.
Collected by Charles Sternberg in 1901. (After Broili.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 35.—PROFESSOR HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN.
]
In the spring of 1897, I was again working in the Texas Permian for
Professor Cope. He was deeply interested in the ancient fauna of the
region, and I was sending him all the finer specimens by express, as I
had during the last two years. On the fifteenth of April, I was camping
on Indian Creek, having just completed a long and trying journey of
about a hundred miles, around the Little Wichita and back to the main
river at Indian Creek. During the trip we had encountered a terrible
windstorm, which had threatened to carry away our tent, but we had
weathered the gale and camped in the timber. I had gone to bed, but was
roused from my cot by the arrival of a livery-man, who had been hunting
for me all the day before. He handed me a message from Mrs. Cope,
announcing the death of her husband on the twelfth of April.
I had lost friends before, and had known what it was to bury my own
dead, even my firstborn son, but I had never sorrowed more deeply than I
did now over the news that in the very prime of life, in the noonday of
his glorious intellectual achievements, as he was bending all his
energies to the study and description of the wonderful fauna of the
Texas Permian, the greatest naturalist in America had passed away with
his work undone. Death is terrible always, but it seems especially so
when it strikes down men in the highest rank of intelligence, who are
adding every day to the world’s knowledge.
I was Cope’s assistant in the field for eight seasons, and while we did
not always agree, I consider the work which I did for him my most
valuable service to science. It has often been my good fortune to supply
him with some important link in the line of descent of vertebrate
life,—such as, for instance, the famous batrachian genera _Dissorophus_
and _Otocœlus_, reptiles with a carapace, indicating the line of descent
of turtles from batrachians, or the camel from the John Day beds, with
the metacarpals and metatarsals distinct,—and to furnish him with a
large number of other forms which, with the material secured by his
other collectors, helped him to acquire what Dr. Osborn has so
truthfully called “a masterly knowledge of each type.”
It is largely due to his efforts that the great science of paleontology,
which, within my remembrance, had but few votaries, is now considered
one of the most interesting studies of modern times. Well did he
prophesy, “After us there will be more demand for our wares”; how well
one can fully realize only when one remembers that the great American
Museum (whose department of paleontology under the able management of
Dr. Henry F. Osborn (Fig. 35) is now one of the glories of science),
that the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg and the Field Columbian in Chicago
and the Museums of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, besides many others
both here and in Europe have been largely built up since he wrote those
words. One thing is certain—as long as science lasts, and men love to
study the animals of the present and of the past, Cope’s name and work
will be remembered and revered.
I am glad to be able to show a good photograph of this lamented
naturalist (Fig. 15). Peace be to his ashes!
CHAPTER X
IN THE RED BEDS OF TEXAS FOR THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF MUNICH, 1901
Warned by my experiences in the red beds of Texas without a team of my
own, when I made a contract to conduct an expedition there under the
direction of Dr. von Zittel of the Paleontological Museum of Munich, I
resolved to ship my own horses and outfit to the field. I gave them into
the charge of my son George, who was rapidly becoming a most valuable
assistant, and saw him put them aboard a freight car and get in himself.
The next time I saw him was at Rush Springs in the Indian Territory, on
top of a freight car, skilled in all the lore of a brakeman.
We reached the old camp at Willow Springs on the thirtieth of June,
1901. The heat had already set in, promising the hottest season that I
had ever experienced in the valley of the Big Wichita. It grew more and
more intense as the months passed, the mercury often rising to 113 in
the shade. All the water dried up in both the natural and the artificial
tanks, and the short buffalo grass in the pastures curled up and blew
away. We were camped in Wagoner’s great pasture, twenty-five miles wide
by fifty long, and I saw cattle die of thirst and starvation. Some had
become so hungry that they had eaten the prickly pear, spines and all,
and their mouths were full of putrefying sores where the spines had
worked out.
The ground was hot, and the air like the breath of a furnace; and we had
to haul all the water we used in camp from six to twenty miles. To add
to our troubles, one of our horses, Baby, almost cut off her foot in a
wire fence while striking at the flies, which, during the day, never
ceased to torture man and beast. Even at night the horned cattle were
not free from them, for they clustered around the base of the horns,
fifteen or twenty deep, like hives of swarming bees, for rest.
The country was indeed a desert and deserted. All the people who had
settled this valley on Coffee Creek or other streams, had gone never to
return; the cowman had bought up all the homesteads. The schoolhouse in
which I had so often attended worship had been moved from its
foundations, and the houses that had once echoed to the merry cries of
children, stood empty and desolate.
How can I describe the hot winds, carrying on their wings clouds of
dust, which were so common that year and the next? I once went to Godwin
Creek, south of Seymour, passing on the way a hundred-acre field of
corn. It belonged to an old man, who had cultivated it until it was
perfectly clean, and the long rows of living green were beautiful to
see. When I passed it again on my way back, a hot wind was blowing, so
hot that I had to shield my face and eyes to keep them from burning. The
beautiful field, upon which the old man had looked with so many hopes of
a rich harvest, had been scorched and seared as if by a blast of fire.
So the weeks lengthened into months, and the merciless sky still refused
us rain. At our camp on Coffee Creek the heat was so terrible that we
could not keep eggs, butter, or milk, or many other edibles necessary to
comfort and health. The result was that my stomach soon got out of
order, and a severe attack of biliousness set in, attended by an
incessant longing for a drink of cold, pure water. I thought by day and
dreamed by night of the well on my farm at home, with the clear water
dripping from the bucket; for our only drink, except coffee, was the
warm, foul-tasting water which had been brought in a barrel from twenty
miles away and had soon become stale. Even that was always giving out at
inconvenient times. Whenever we came to a new fossil locality, and the
hope was strong within me that now we would make a rich find, George was
sure to say, “Papa, we’re out of water,” and we had to make the long
journey through the awful heat over the dust-laden roads to the well at
Seymour, twenty miles away. When we reached it at last, how we buried
our faces in the bucket and the cool water!
[Illustration]
PALAEONTOLGISCHE
SAMMLUNG
DES STAATES
Alte Akademie.
München, den 23 December
190
Charles Sternberg Esquire.
Lawrence City Ka
My dear Sir,
Before receiving your last letter of the 6th Decemb. I had sent to
your address a cheque of 200$ as Salary for the last month of your
collecting in Texas. I take notice of your freight expenses (3$ 46c)
and shall sent this little sum by an other occasion.
The 5 boxes with your great collection as well as the express box
with the little skulls have been safely arrived. I have looked over
the results of your researches and think that the collection of this
year is better than any other made before in Texas. With few
exceptions we have nearly all the genera created by Prof Cope and
several of these in much better condition. Beside theire is
certainly a good number of very interesting and new material which
will give us bussiness for several years.
I am very glad that I can give you such a satisfactory report about
your hard work in the interest of our museum and I hope to remain
further in friendly relations with yourself.
With the best wishes for the coming year and the kindest regards
faithfully yours
Dr. Zittel
But I will not dwell on this side of the picture, because there is
another side. We were finding in wonderful abundance the material which
we had come to secure, and the hardships were forgotten in the joy of
success. In spite of the many obstacles with which we had to contend, we
secured the collection described in that great letter from Dr. von
Zittel which I publish here in facsimile and which I prize more than any
letter I ever received.
Before I accepted von Zittel’s offer that I should conduct an expedition
for him in the brakes of the Big Wichita, I wrote to him, telling him
how my work for science had had, from a material standpoint, no great
returns. My life, I said, had been a constant struggle to secure
sufficient funds to carry on the work, and the men who had bought my
material had for the most part felt that they were doing good service to
their museums by securing it at the lowest possible price, without
taking into consideration that even a fossil hunter has to live.
It was with pleasure indeed that I received the answer of this great
German, whose works on paleontology are used as text-books in our
universities. Dr. von Zittel wrote: “I am sorry that from your letter
you do not consider yourself in a position to work for the Munich Museum
in Texas this spring. I can readily understand that after your long
activity in scientific fields without material results you are somewhat
discouraged and embittered, and feel that your services in this
direction have not been sufficiently appreciated. For my part, I have
done my best to give you credit for the scientific side of your work,
and your collections from Kansas and Texas in the Munich Museum will
always be an everlasting memorial to the name of Charles Sternberg.”
Such a letter, from a man like von Zittel, put new life and courage into
my veins, as a similar letter from Professor Cope had once before, and
made me feel that a little suffering more or less mattered nothing when
measured with such enduring results. Cope is dead and von Zittel is
dead, so far as such men can die, but I have preserved their letters as
heirlooms for my children’s children; for they testify that “no matter
what the common herd may say about me,” I have accomplished the object
which I set before myself as a boy, and have done my humble part toward
building up the great science of paleontology. I shall perish, but my
fossils will last as long as the museums that have secured them.
But to return to the Texas Permian. I will follow my notebook for a
while, as that, perhaps, is the best way to give my readers an idea of
our life there.
On the eleventh of July 1 was in Seymour. I write: “A big dust storm
struck the town, and this evening a rain is falling. This is indeed a
great relief to me, as it will make the air cooler and give me water in
the brakes, so that I can visit localities I could not before. My wagon,
brought from Kansas, is a narrow-gauge one, and all the roads in Texas
are cut by broad-gauge wagons. This forces my team to pull with one set
of wheels in the rut and the other outside. Consequently the labor is
wearing them out, in connection with the awful heat. I am, therefore,
having new axles made, a long and tedious work, and I am resting out of
the heat. Jesse S. Williamson has told me to occupy the building owned
by himself and Will Minnich. It is a little cabin within a mile of the
bone bed near Willow Springs. It has a tank of water for the horses, and
is but a mile away from the schoolhouse, where a well has been dug. A
few bucketsful a day, enough for camp use, trickles into it.” This cabin
proved to be a great accommodation, especially as the owners had a stack
of sorghum, which was placed at my disposal and saved me the trouble of
hauling out hay.
As one of my spindles was broken, I had to send to Lawrence for another,
and it was not until the sixteenth that I got my wagon from the shop. I
then drove out to my old camp on Grey Creek in Mr. Craddock’s pasture.
Here, too, was the center of a field from which I had reaped a rich
harvest for Professor Cope.
On the seventeenth, my notebook states that I was in the field all day
and found fragments of skeletons and skulls, all broken to pieces and
mixed up together. I could not find the horizon from which these
specimens came. They were all piled together with concretions in a long,
narrow wash, while above there was a level denuded tract covered with
concretions. The only way in which I can account for the mixture of
fragmentary specimens is that a bone bed lay above the level stretch,
and in the disintegration of the deposit, the fragments were carried by
floods into the narrow gulch, until not a sign of the original bed was
left to mark its site.
I had sent a large collection from this same locality to Professor Cope,
and he had been much interested, but had also been extremely tantalized
by the fact that there were great numbers of fragmentary skulls, and
that although the fragments looked freshly broken, none of the pieces
could be united to form a perfect skull. I now found the same trouble
again. Possibly some of the missing fragments of the skulls in Cope’s
collection, now in the American Museum, may be in the lot sent to
Munich, and vice versa.
On the nineteenth, I found the nearly perfect skull of a new species,
and on the twentieth, another very fine skull near the locality from
which I had secured the many fragments a day or two before. It was a
skull of the great salamander, _Eryops megacephalus_ Cope. There were
six pairs of large teeth in the roof of the mouth, and a single row of
various sizes in the mandibles. Some of the points had been broken off
and were lost. The skull is over twenty inches long. All the bones are
beautifully sculptured on the external surface. A few years before I had
found a nearly complete skeleton of this creature, some twelve feet in
length, lying at right angles to the Chisholm Trail. It was preserved in
hard concretions, and had weathered out on the slope of a hill. The feet
of countless cattle, just starting out on their weary journey for Kansas
and the North, had worn away the solid siliceous envelope to the bones.
How the salamander tribe has degenerated since the days of these
powerful creatures! Supplied with both gills and lungs, they dominated
land and water, and increasing and multiplying in the tropical
atmosphere, filled the swamps and bayous of this region. To-day we pull
from some well or spring a weak creature called a mud puppy, and it is
hard to realize that its ancestors, twelve million years ago, were
strong and mighty, the monarchs of creation.
To return to Mr. Craddock’s pasture; on July twentieth my notes read: “I
am suffering from the heat, my tongue badly coated. However, I have got
some splendid material. If I succumb to the awful heat and die, my
discoveries will have done much toward enriching the collection at
Munich.”
On July twenty-first, I continue: “It is fearfully hot to-day, and I
cannot work the beds without great suffering. I found a little skull.”
The hot weather continued, and I went out to the cabin on Coffee Creek.
Pet, our four-year-old, got away, and when George took her from a herd
of horses, he found a big hole in her shoulder. “Both horses are failing
fast,” my notes read. “Have to send George in for feed. It is hard on
the team to have to haul a load this weather through dust knee-deep,
with no water fit to drink.”
On the twenty-sixth, I was left alone, and went a mile north to the bone
bed and began to dig into the face of a hard greenish layer of
clay-stone, near a place where I had found some fragments in former
years. I was delighted to find a pocket with two good skulls _in situ_,
and the next day George returned with his load, and I had some fresh
water, which soon, however, grew lukewarm. We found two more skulls in
the pocket referred to, one of which was the _Labidosaurus hamatus_
Cope, one of the earliest of reptiles. Another was that of a new genus
and species which I found later, when we went back to Grey Creek to get
a camp ready to receive Dr. Broili. He was to come directly from Munich
to my camp in the red beds.
On the first of August, as we were out of provisions, we went into town.
I rented a large room over a store building, and made tables and
unpacked specimens for Dr. Broili’s inspection. While I was working
there, a storm of grasshoppers struck the building, beating against it
like hailstones; and the next morning the ground was covered with them.
On the fifth, we drove out to our old camp on Grey Creek, and pitched
two tents with the fly stretched between. The walls were elevated, and
we were able to make a shade against the rays of the relentless sun. I
went a couple of miles north, over the table mountain above camp, and
found two extremely beautiful skulls of the long-horned amphibian,[2]
_Diplocaulus magnicornis_ Cope, a strange animal of which I have already
spoken. I found also a specimen of the gar-pike, that ancient fish which
has left its enameled scales in the rocks of many formations, whose
descendants are still living in our rivers.
Footnote 2:
See Fig. 34.
On the eighth of August, in spite of the debilitating heat, I started on
a long trip to the head of Brushy Creek, on horseback. I climbed Table
Mountain, which was, perhaps, three hundred feet above the camp, and
struck west along the divide between the two creeks. I frequently left
the horse tied to a fence, while I plunged down into the gorges on
either side. At last, about three miles northwest of camp, at the bend
of a branch of Brushy Creek, I noticed a denuded tract of the kind of
bed I have already described, to which an abundance of bog iron lent a
metallic luster; the very place to look for fossils.
The first thing I found was the perfect skull, six inches long, of a
batrachian (_Diplocaulus copei_ Broili); then, lying on the surface,
another beautiful skull (_Varanosaurus acutirostris_ Broili), with many
of the bones of the skeleton, from which the hard red matrix had been
washed off clean. The upper and lower jaws were locked together, and the
long row of glistening teeth shone in the fierce light. The eyes were
set far back, and the nose openings were near the front. It was so
different from anything I had ever seen before that I was sure it must
be new. Dr. Broili, in describing it, speaks of it as the most perfect
specimen ever found in these beds. Nearly all the other skulls I had
secured are compressed vertically, while this was compressed laterally.
I found in this bed hundreds of fragments of rock filled with the
glittering scales of fishes, as brilliant now as in the days when they
covered the bodies of these old fish. Here, also, I discovered a huge
specimen of the long-horned species (_Diplocaulus magnicornis?_), and
others much smaller, which proved to be the new _Diplocaulus copei_.
“This,” my notes say, “promises to be one of the finest localities I
have found, and pays for the days of search under trying conditions.”
When I reached camp, I found that George also had had a red-letter day,
and had found a bone bed of minute animals on some brakes of Grey Creek
under the roots of the grass in a washout. He brought in a skull, the
smallest I had ever collected, with a great many broken bones and teeth.
One specimen, which Dr. Broili named in my honor _Cardicephalus
sternbergi_, was not over half an inch long. I secured here six skulls
of the new _Diplocaulus copei_, also.
On Monday, the twelfth of August, Dr. Broili reached Seymour, and George
and I met him at the station. A tall, strong, fine-looking German, with
a full beard, he impressed me very favorably. The great difficulty was
that, owing to my deaf ear, it was very hard for me to understand his
broken English, and unfortunately I could not speak a word of German. I
judged that he had learned his English from an Englishman and not from
an American, as he used a peculiar brogue with which I was not familiar.
George learned to understand him better, and they became the best of
friends.
We went back to camp, where we had the pleasure of Dr. Broili’s company
for two weeks, during which I formed a friendship which I have always
deeply appreciated. He was delighted with my work and the material we
had secured, but, as he says in the introduction to his great work
describing my material, he could not stand the heat.
He describes part of my material in his splendid work on the Permian
Stegocephala and reptiles, published in Stuttgart, with one hundred and
twenty pages of text and thirteen fine plates. He says on p. 1: “The
excellent results of the expedition of Mr. Sternberg in the spring of
1901 to Texas, which brought many very valuable specimens of _Eryops_,
_Dimetredon_, and _Labidosaurus_ to the Paleontological Museum’s
collection, caused the conservator of the Royal Paleontological
Collection, Councillor von Zittel, to send out in the year of 1901 a
second expedition to the Permian beds of the same territory, he being
again successful in securing Mr. Charles Sternberg, the excellent
collector from Lawrence, Kansas. Already in June of the same year he was
in the midst of his sphere of activity in the Wichita Permian beds, near
the small town of Seymour, Baylor County, located on a branch of the
Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. On my arrival in the camp, through the
assistance of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Science, it was made
possible for me to take part in the collection from the beginning to the
end of August. I found already a very good collection of very rich
materials, which, besides parts of _Dimetredon_, _Labidosaurus_,
_Pariotichus_, and other Theromorphs, included an excellent collection
of different examples of _Diplocaulus_, of which some still possessed
the greater part of the vertebræ. During my stay in that territory, our
work principally consisted in making collections from our camp. We were
compelled, on account of scarcity of water from the great heat, to keep
near Seymour.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 36.—DR. KARL VON ZITTEL.
Born September 25, 1839. Died January 5, 1904.
(After Pampeckj.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 37.—SHELL OF _Toxochelys bauri_?
Discovered by Charles Sternberg in Gove Co., Kansas. (After Weiland.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 38.—NIOBRARA GROUP, CRETACEOUS CHALK WITH CAP ROCK OF LOUP FORK
TERTIARY, KNOWN AS CASTLE ROCK, GOVE CO., KANSAS. (Photo, by
McClung.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 39.—CHALK OF KANSAS, KNOWN AS THE COFFEE MILL. HELL CREEK.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 40.—BONES OF _Platecarpus coryphæus_.
As found by Charles Sternberg. Sent for mounting to Tübingen
University.
]
I am a patriot, and it would have pleased me to see all these splendid
examples of ancient life enrich our home museums; but Germany is my
fatherland, at least it was the fatherland of my fathers, and I am glad
to have been able to build up there the best collection of Kansas and
Texas forms in Europe.
One of the greatest prizes of the Munich Collection is a skeleton of
_Labidosaurus_, now mounted there and collected by myself.
_Labidosaurus_ is important because it belongs to a very ancient and
primitive group of reptiles, which, according to Prof. H. F. Osborn and
other authorities, were the ancestors of all the later forms of
reptiles.
After Dr. Broili left to return to Munich, I continued my work, camping
on east Coffee Creek. Here again our search was rewarded. I found
another bone bed of very small lizards, some of them, I think, not over
six inches long. The skulls ranged in size from less than half an inch
to an inch in length. Cope has given them the name _Lysorophus
tricarinatus_. Drs. Broili and Case in their valuable papers have shown
that this _Lysorophus_ is one of the most interesting genera of all this
wonderful fauna, since in the structure of the skull it is a veritable
“missing link” between the batrachia and reptilia.
The deposit in which I found the _Lysorophus_ was large, containing
thousands of bones and many fine skulls. I am convinced that these
creatures must have hibernated, as many of them were coiled in a circle
in an envelope of hardened mud, and appear to have lain down never to
wake again, each tiny reptile and its nest having been preserved through
all the ages since. The flesh, of course, decayed soon after death, but
by the process of petrification the bones have been replaced by stone.
Now I have always wanted to explain to a popular audience what this
process of petrification really is. The word petrification should be
dropped from our vocabulary, because it signifies an impossibility. I
remember, as a boy, translating from the Latin a sentence like this—“His
bones became stone,” that is, turned to stone, and one often hears the
expression petrified wood as meaning wood which has turned to stone; as
if there were a process in nature by which one substance could be turned
into another, as the philosopher’s stone would have changed iron to
gold. As a matter of fact, the process denoted by the word petrification
is a process of replacement, not of transmutation. After the death of
these ancient animals and the decay of their flesh, the water that
passed through the bones carried from the cells of which they were made
up the organic contents which decay, and left in their place deposits of
the silica or lime which it held in solution. The same process continued
when the lagoon bed was elevated above the water as solid rock. The
rain-water, seeping down through rock and fossil alike, left in the bone
cells the mineral matter it was carrying, until they were filled with
it. Then, in process of time, the cell walls are broken down and rebuilt
with silica or lime, and complete fossilization, or petrifaction as it
is called, takes place, as in the case of the fossil bones in the Texas
Permian. I found one specimen of the ladder-spined reptile in which the
bones had been entirely replaced by iron ore, and others made up of
silica.
How long does it take for the mineral matter to replace entirely the
original bones? Ages upon ages. I found on the plains of Kansas a quarry
of elephant bones, from which I took over two hundred teeth of the
Columbian mammoth, some of the larger ones weighing fourteen pounds
each. The broken bones were scattered by the ton through the matrix. I
had them analyzed by Dr. Bailey, the head of the chemical department of
Kansas State University, and he found only ten per cent. of silicified
matter in them; that is, they were only ten per cent. less rich in
phosphate of lime than Armour’s ground bone meal. This great elephant
lived about the time of the Ohio mastodon, whose bones have been found
in such a position as to indicate that they were buried when Niagara
Falls were six miles below their present site. So if we knew how long it
has taken the river to dig six miles of its big ditch, we could tell how
long it has taken to impregnate the bones of the mammoths in central
Kansas with ten per cent. of silica. How foolish, then, to speak of
completely petrified men, when man had probably not made his appearance
in America at the time of the mammoths.
The rocks of the Texas Permian, as I have already mentioned, are of red
clay filled with concretions of every conceivable form. I remember once
rounding a butte and seeing before me hundreds of cocoanuts, some whole
and others with the brownish shells broken, showing the white meat
within. Absent-mindedly, I sprang from my horse to feast upon them, to
find that they were concretions which had so closely imitated cocoanuts
in shape and color that even I, an experienced collector, had been
momentarily deceived. I knew, too, of a man who exhibited a collection
of large concretions as fossil Hubbard squashes, and I heard no one
doubting that they were all that their labels claimed.
There are two distinct formations in the Permian of this part of Texas
which give character to the surface of the country. They are as
different as if separated by hundreds of miles. I visited one locality
on Pony Creek, where the red beds lay on top of the gray beds
conformably. Looking to the west, a vast panorama, desolate and forlorn,
of crumbling and denuded bluffs, narrow valleys, and beetling crags,
spread out before me, with the usual red color dominant everywhere, its
monotony relieved only here and there by the green of some stunted
mesquite or patch of grass. To the east stretched the narrow valley of
Pony Creek, whose topography is the same as that which is so familiar to
the residents of eastern Kansas—a ledge of gray sandstone forming a
narrow escarpment on either side and following the trend of the hills
around the ravines, with grass coming down in gentle swells to meet it
or rising to it from the bottom lands below. The greatest thickness of
this sandstone, as I observed it, was at the head of a narrow gulch near
my camp in the creek bottom, eight miles north of Seymour. I made a
section there and sent samples of the rock to Munich.
I observed this rock under peculiar circumstances, and found that it
solved an interesting problem—that of the water supply of the red beds.
I discovered why the water that falls where these beds only are exposed
runs off soon after a shower, except when caught in natural or
artificial tanks, so that there are no wells or springs in the red beds,
while in the gray beds there are always springs and streams of running
water.
In the September of my 1901 expedition, the heaviest rain since May fell
in torrents for an hour and a half; water lay everywhere on the surface
of the ground. But soon after the rain stopped, it had all disappeared.
My son had discovered across the creek a locality which was rich in
fossil invertebrates, consisting chiefly of straight and coiled
nautilus-like shells; and shortly after the downpour I went over to set
to work collecting them, as Dr. Broili had told me that the Munich
Museum was anxious to secure such a collection. I had not been long at
work before George shouted to me that if I did not want to swim I would
better cross the creek again at once. I followed his advice so hastily
that I left my tools behind. Instantly, a raging, boiling flood of water
covered the rocks in the bed of the creek, over which I had just crossed
dry-shod, and rapidly rose to a height of eight feet, threatening to
submerge my camp.
Looking for a good place to work on my side of the creek, the west, I
found the gulch which I have referred to above. There was a level floor,
formed by the first stratum of the gray beds, extending about five
hundred yards to a ledge of red sandstone, eight feet thick. The floor
was covered with debris washed from the red beds. To my astonishment,
although the surface was dry, a flood of water was rushing out from
under the upper deposits and tumbling in a miniature waterfall over the
gray ledge, which was nearly five feet thick, into the ravine below.
The rock I found to be composed of four layers of sandstone. The upper
layer, eight inches thick, is composed of fine-grained sand, which seems
to have been ground to an impalpable powder by the beating of the waves.
It is very compact and heavy, and upon exposure, breaks into rectangular
blocks, so perfect in shape that they can be used for building purposes
without being touched by hammer or chisel. The second layer breaks into
large blocks of many tons’ weight. It is coarser grained than No. 1, and
is about twenty inches thick. It contains a few casts of invertebrate
fossils. No. 3 is twelve inches thick, and is of the same general
character as the other layers. It is literally packed with casts of
straight and coiled shells related to our living nautilus. They are
mingled in great confusion. I believe some of the coiled shells are a
foot in diameter. This stratum is not so compact as the others, and
seems to contain more lime. No. 4 is a very solid gray sandstone, eight
inches thick, its upper surface crossed at various angles by elevated
ridges of harder material.
From these observations, I am led to the conclusion that the pervious
nature of the red beds, which in the valley of the Wichita are about
three hundred feet thick, allows the water to sink rapidly down through
them until it reaches the impenetrable gray sandstone; from which it
runs off at whatever angle the rocks may be tilted.
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
I may begin this closing chapter by mentioning some other specimens
which I have discovered, or which my sons have, for, thank God, I have
raised up a race of fossil hunters. My second son, Charles M. Sternberg,
has in his person recently fulfilled a dream of forty years of my own,
by discovering the most complete skeleton known of Professor Marsh’s
great toothed-bird, _Hesperornis regalis_, the Royal Bird of the West.
Unfortunately the skull is missing, otherwise the nearly complete
skeleton is present, and strange to say in normal position, showing that
Dr. F. A. Lucas is right in his restoration of the Martin specimen as
mounted in the National Museum, i. e., as a loon, a diver instead of a
wader, as had been supposed. Our specimen, however, shows a much longer
neck than he had imagined. Strange indeed was this long-necked diver
with its tarsus at right angles with the body and its powerful
web-footed feet. The body was narrow, a little over four inches wide,
with a backbone like the keel of a boat. The head was ten inches long
and armed with sharp teeth. By keeping the body horizontal it could
explore a column of water six feet high and wide, for any unfortunate
fish within the zone of its activity. I would name this great loon the
Snake-Bird of the Niobrara Group. This specimen I longed to find for so
many years, but was glad to give the credit to my son. It is to be
mounted in the American Museum, and I picture it as it left my
laboratories (Fig. 41).
A word also about that great flying machine of the Cretaceous, the
flying lizard _Pteranodon_. The skeleton and a very fine skull, which my
son found on Hackberry Creek in 1906, is now mounted in the British
Museum, where my warm friend Dr. A. Smith Woodward assures me “my
specimens are greatly admired.”
Especially have I been fortunate in the Kansas Chalk where my son,
George Fryer, has charge as I write these lines of my twentieth
expedition to those beds, and where he has discovered, and safely
collected and shipped to my laboratory, a great plate of the beautiful
stemless Crinoid _Uintacrinus socialis_. I sent one section to Professor
M. Boule, of the National Natural History Museum of France, at Paris.
Hundreds of these rare animals are represented in this slab (Fig. 42).
[Illustration:
FIG. 41.—SKELETON OF _Hesperornis regalis_, THE GIANT TOOTHED-BIRD OF
THE KANSAS CRETACEOUS.
Discovered by Charles M. Sternberg. In American Museum of Natural
History.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 42.—SLAB OF FOSSIL CRINOIDS, _Unitacrinus socialis_, CONTAINING
160 CALYCES, COVERING FOUR BY SEVEN FEET.
]
Before these pages go to press, and a year after I began work on them, I
am pleased to be able to tell my readers of two noble specimens of the
Pleistocene Age I have just secured from the plains of Kansas, that
great treasure house of the animals of the past. One is a majestic
Bison, whose head towering above that of his fellows supported a pair of
horn cores measuring six feet from tip to tip. Along the curve the
distance is eight feet. The length of the head is two feet, the distance
between the horns sixteen inches, and from the center of the orbits, one
foot. These splendid horn cores were uncovered through a fortunate
chance. It seems that the Missouri Pacific Railway, wishing to shorten
the creek in the vicinity of Hoxie, Sheridan County, Kansas, cut a new
right-of-way for it across a bend. Their excavation came within two feet
of the bones buried below, thirty-five feet from the surface of the
earth; a friendly freshet washed them out, and they were discovered by
Mr. Frank Lee and Harley Henderson, of Hoxie, Kansas, June 15, 1902. I
was so fortunate as to secure them in June, 1908. I have filled them
with white shellac, and they are now in condition to be preserved
always, a specimen of the grand old bison of the Pleistocene time. Now
their burial places are three thousand feet nearer the stars than the
day they were buried there, as then the climate was semi-tropical and
the land they roamed over near sea level. The largest pair of horn cores
of a similar bison are preserved in the Cincinnati Natural History
Museum. I copy from one of their records: “The most conspicuous figure
on Plate IX, with immense horn cores, is of the long extinct
broad-fronted bison. This specimen, by far the finest of its kind in
existence, is the greatest prize in the Cincinnati Museum. It was found
in 1869 on Brush Creek, Brown County, Ohio, and through the efforts of
Dr. O. D. Norton it was acquired by the Museum in 1875.” It gives me
great pleasure to show my readers a photograph of the Kansas form that
measures along the curve of the horn cores a foot and a half more than
the famous Ohio specimen. (Fig. 43.)
The great Columbian Elephant, whose jaw I illustrate and have still in
my possession, represents one of the largest, or the largest, of its
kind ever discovered. It was found near the town of Ness City, in Ness
County, Kansas. This giant lived at the same time the great Bison
existed. The last molars have pushed out the worn premolars and the
other two molars, and occupy the entire jaw, having a grinding surface
of 5 × 9 inches. The lower parts of the teeth flare out like a fan, and
measure twenty inches along the top of the roots. The greatest
circumference of the jaws is 26½ inches, and the length 32 inches.
Unfortunately, the articulations are worn away, likely by rolling in
some river bed. I secured this noble representative of American
Elephants in June, 1908 (Fig. 44).
[Illustration:
FIG. 43.—SKULL AND HORNS OF GIANT BISON FROM HOXIE, KANSAS.
Spread of horn cores six feet, one inch; length along curve, eight
feet.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 44.—JAW OF COLUMBIAN MAMMOTH, _Elephas columbi_.
Discovered in Ness County, Kansas.
]
How rich are the strata that compose the earth’s crust only a fossil
hunter can fully realize. Take, for instance, western Kansas, where the
soil beneath our feet is one vast cemetery. I know of a ravine in Logan
County which cuts through four great formations. The lower levels, of
reddish and blue chalk, are filled with the remains of swimming lizards,
with the wonderful Pteranodonts, the most perfect flying machines ever
known, with the toothed bird _Hesperornis_, the royal bird of the West,
and the fish-bird _Ichthyornis_, with fish-like biconcave vertebræ, with
fishes small and great (one form over sixteen feet long), and huge
sea-tortoises. Above are the black shales of the Fort Pierre Cretaceous,
thousands of feet of which are exposed in the bad lands of the upper
Missouri. In this formation the dinosaurs reign supreme. Still higher
are the mortar beds of the Loup Fork Tertiary, where the dominant type
changes from reptiles to mammals. Here, in western Kansas, are found
great numbers of the short-limbed rhinoceros, the large land-turtle,
_Testudo orthopygia_, several inferior tusked mastodons, the
saber-toothed tiger, the three-toed horse, and a deer only about
eighteen inches high. Higher still, where the grass roots shoot down to
feed on the bones, are the Columbian mammoth, the one-toed horse, like
our species of to-day, a camel like our South American llama, and a
bison far larger than the present species.
The living bison has become almost extinct itself, through the agency of
man. And in the layer of soil which covers all these formations, an old
arrowhead and the crumbling bones of a modern buffalo give an object
lesson in the manner in which these relics of the earlier world have
been preserved. So races of animals, as of men, reach their highest
state of development, retrograde, and give place to other races, which,
living in the same regions, obey the same laws of progress.
My readers will be pleased, I am sure, to know that just before these
pages go to press I am permitted to tell the story of our last great
hunt in Converse County, Wyoming, during July, August, and September,
1908, for the largest skull of any known vertebrate, the great
three-horned dinosaur, _Triceratops_ (Fig. 45). Only thirteen good
specimens are known to American museums, 7 of which are in Yale
University Museum, and were collected, I believe, by J. B. Hatcher. From
his field notes Mr. Hatcher has made a map of this region with crosses
to indicate the localities in which skulls have been found, and 30 are
so indicated, but I soon learned that he noted broken and poor material,
as well as the more perfect. With my three sons I entered the region
with enthusiasm on the hunt for one of these skulls for the British
Museum of Natural History.
[Illustration:
FIG. 45.—THREE-HORNED DINOSAUR, _Triceratops_ sp.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 46.—DUCK-BILLED DINOSAUR, _Trachodon mirabilis_.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of
Natural History.)
]
I was not employed by that institution, but the agreement was, in case I
secured a good specimen, it was to go to them. I must acknowledge I felt
rather dubious when Dr. Osborn of the American Museum wrote me that he
had had parties in these beds four years, searching without success for
a specimen. For weeks and weeks we four examined every bit of exposed
rock in vain. The rock consisted of clay and sandstone, the latter both
massive and cross-bedded. Scattered through the great deposits of
sandstone were peculiar-shaped masses of very hard flinty rock, with the
same physical characteristics but with superior hardness. These added
strange forms to the land sculptury. Almost every form the mind can
imagine is found here, from colonies of giant mushrooms, to human faces
so startling as to secure instant attention from the observer. (Figs. 38
and 39.)
A general view of the country from an elevated butte shows many
cone-like mounds, resembling table mountains or even haystacks in the
hazy distance! As the rocks, and even the flint-like material, readily
disintegrate, the creeks that run east into the Cheyenne River soon
radiate like the rays of a fan and deeply scar the narrow divides into
rather deep canyons and narrow ravines. Perhaps a thousand feet of these
fresh-water beds, are laid down in a basin surrounded, on all sides, by
the marine, Fort Pierre, and Fox Hills Cretaceous.
Buck Creek on the south, Cheyenne River on north and east, and a line
through the mouth of Lightning Creek would roughly give the area of the
Laramie Beds we explored. They cover about a thousand square miles. Here
in a country given up entirely to cattle and sheep ranges with but
little of the country fenced, meeting no one but now and then a lonely
sheep herder, my tribe of fossil hunters entered with bounding hope that
we might find some of these famous dinosaurs.
Here is the border land between the Age of Reptiles and of Mammals,
where mammals first appear as small marsupials. We secured several teeth
of these early mammals. Day after day hoping against hope we struggled
bravely on. Every night the boys gave answer to my anxious inquiry, What
have you found? Nothing. Often we ran out of palatable food, as we were
65 miles from our base, and did not always realize how our appetites
would be sharpened by our miles of tramping over the rough hills and
ravines. One day in August, Levi and I started in our one-horse buggy to
a camp we had made near the cedar hills on Schneider Creek. As we passed
a small exposure which I had not gone over, I left him to drive and went
over the beds of reddish shale, the remnant of an old peat-bog. I found
the end of a horn core of _Triceratops_, and further excavation showed I
had stumbled upon the burial place of one of these rare dinosaurs. How
thankful we were that after so much useless labor we had at last secured
the great object of our hunt. It will prove a beautiful skull when
prepared and mounted under the direction of Dr. Smith Woodward, Keeper
of Geology in the British Museum, where so many of my discoveries have
gone.
Unfortunately the skull was somewhat broken up, and one horn core is
missing. But one side of the face with the large horn core, the back of
the head, and the great posterior crest, seems entire, as well as large
pieces of the other side of the face, and a fine specimen will be made
of it. The total length of the skull is 6 feet 6 inches. The horn core
over the eye is 2 feet 4 inches high; while the circumference in the
middle is 2 feet 8 inches, and it is 15 inches in diameter at the base.
This was a fully matured animal. As the bony ossicles of the head
armature are co-ossified with the margin and remain as undulations more
or less sharply defined, I am inclined to believe that they are
ornaments. They might assist a little in defense but not offense.
In the mean time my oldest son, George, told me of a region he had
explored a half-mile from our camp near the head of a ravine. Here we
had found a natural cistern full of rain-water, protected from the sun
and cattle by a couple of great concretion-like masses of rock that
covered it. Over the divide where I had found the great skull, between
Boggy and the breaks of Schneider near its mouth in Cheyenne River,
George took Levi and myself. The evening before, I took the skull in to
Lusk for shipment. George pointed out a locality in which he had found a
bone-bed, where we later secured many teeth of reptiles and fishes,
scales of ganoid fishes, bones of small dinosaurs and crocodiles and the
beautifully sculptured shells of turtles, Trionyx, etc. As there was
still a tract of a few hundred yards to be explored the two boys started
to go over it, while I went to the bone-bed. They soon joined me with
the information that they had found some bones sticking out of a high
escarpment of sandstone. George had found part of the specimen in one
place and Levi another part soon afterwards. I requested George to
carefully uncover the floor on which the bones lay.
While we were taking in our skull, George and Levi ran nearly out of
provisions, and the last day of our absence lived on boiled potatoes.
But in spite of this they had removed a mass of sandstone 12 feet wide,
15 feet deep, and 10 feet high.
Shall I ever experience such joy as when I stood in the quarry for the
first time, and beheld lying in state the most complete skeleton of an
extinct animal I have ever seen, after forty years of experience as a
collector! The crowning specimen of my life work!
A great duck-billed dinosaur, a relative of _Trachodon mirabilis_, lay
on its back with front limbs stretched out as if imploring aid, while
the hind limbs in a convulsive effort were drawn up and folded against
the walls of the abdomen. The head lay under the right shoulder. One
theory might be that he had fallen on his back into a morass, and either
broken his neck or had been unable to withdraw his head from under his
body, and had choked to death or drowned. If this was so the antiseptic
character of the peat-bog had preserved the flesh until, through decay,
the contents of the viscera had been replaced with sand. It lay there
with expanded ribs as in life, wrapped in the impressions of the skin
whose beautiful patterns of octagonal plates marked the fine sandstone
above the bones. George had cut away the rock, leaving enough to give
the impression that even the flesh was replaced by sandstone, giving an
exact picture of him, as he breathed his last some five million of years
ago.
A more probable explanation, judging from the shape of the skin outline
which covers the abdomen and is sunken into the body cavity at least a
foot, is that the great creature died in the water. The gases forming in
the body floated the carcass, which was then carried by currents to the
final burial place. When the gases escaped, the skin collapsed and
occupied their place; the carcass sank head first and feet upward, the
former dragging under the shoulder as the body came to rest on the mud
of the bottom.
Quite different indeed is this grand example of extinct life from the
one restored and of which an ideal picture is given in this book (Fig.
46). In the first place, in the specimen we discovered the ribs are
expanded, the great chest cavity measuring 18 inches deep, 24 inches
long, and 30 inches wide. I have no doubt but that with lungs expanded
to their full capacity, he often swam across streams of water in the
tropical jungle in which he lived and died. Further, the front limbs are
not mere arms, that never touched the ground, but were used in
locomotion, as there are toes with hoof-bones, not so large as those of
the hind feet but with the same pattern, and a divergent thumb, that had
a round bone for its ungual. Consequently the animal could use the front
feet as clumsy hands to hold down the limb of a tree from which he was
cropping the tender foliage, or banners of moss. There were three
powerful hoofs on each hind foot.
I do not question, in the presence of this individual, which is complete
excepting the hind feet, tail and left tibia and fibula, but that the
reptile often stood erect, supporting his ponderous weight while feeding
on the leaves of the forest. But when it walked it used its front limbs
as well. A remarkable character are the countless rods of solid bone
that lay along the backbone in the flesh, and appear like ossified
tendons similar to those in the leg of a turkey. Hundreds of ossified
rods appeared, row after row, shaped like Indian beads, as thick as a
lead pencil in the center and beveled off to a small round point. It has
occurred to me that these were for defense; that when a great
_Tyrannosaurus rex_ leaped on his back, his powerful claws found no
lodgment in the flesh on account of these bony rods that could not be
penetrated. Thus our dinosaur would shake off his enemy.
* * * * *
How wonderful are the works of an Almighty hand! The life that now is,
how small a fraction of the life that has been! Miles of strata,
mountain high, are but the stony sepulchers of the life of the past.
How rapidly has the field expanded which I entered as a pioneer some
forty years ago! In 1867 I knew only five paleontologists—Agassiz,
Lesquereux, Marsh, Cope, and Leidy, with but few followers; while
to-day, Harvard, Princeton, the American, the Carnegie, the Field, and
the National Museums have all built up great collections of the animals
and plants of the past, and the number of publications on fossil animals
has reached an enormous total.
I had the pleasure of attending the meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science that met in the American Museum in New
York at the mid-winter session in 1906. Professor Osborn introduced me
to his splendid Head Preparator, Mr. Hermann, who has mounted the
skeletons of the great _Brontosaurus_, _Allosaurus_, and so many other
examples of extinct animals. Mr. Hermann was requested by the Professor
to devote all his spare time to showing me anything the exhibition and
storerooms contained, prepared or unprepared, and to do all in his power
to make my visit pleasant. I certainly felt at home in that paradise of
ancient animals, many of which I had collected for science on my own
explorations. The magnificent halls in which they are exhibited are a
wonderful tribute paid by the wealth and intelligence of the citizen of
Greater New York to science. How admirable that Mr. Jesup should use his
private fortune as the means to take from the obscurity of the private
dwelling of the late Professor Cope his great collection, to which I was
a contributor for eight years; and he has placed it under Professor
Henry F. Osborn, who with the assistance of Drs. J. L. Wortman, W. D.
Matthew, and others, has brought order out of chaos and presented in
intelligible shape not only that collection but many others from the
fossil fields of the West.
It is a glorious thought to me that I have lived to see my wildest
dreams come true, that I have seen stately halls rise to be graced with
many of the animals of the past that lived in countless thousands, and
that I have had the pleasure of securing some of the treasures, in the
shape of complete skeletons, which now adorn those halls.
I stood on Columbia Heights that same year of 1906, and my heart swelled
with pride when I looked down on that teeming metropolis and remembered
that I too was a native of the Empire State. Then I thought of my
distant prairie state of Kansas, and gloried in the thought that the
best years of my life had been spent in her ancient ocean and lake beds,
those old cemeteries of creation.
That past life, at least a very small fraction of it, I have sought to
bring before my readers with pen pictures. We have men among us who can
put their conceptions of the ancient inhabitants of land and sea and air
on canvas, and among them are Mr. Charles R. Knight, of the American
Museum, and Mr. Sidney Prentice, of the Carnegie Museum. Mr. Prentice I
knew as a boy, and he has done me the honor to assure me that my words
of counsel have done something at least toward assisting him to make the
choice of following the work not only of an artist in a paleontological
museum, but in portraying with pencil and brush the ideal pictures of
the early denizens of earth as in life. His success is shown in his
restorations of _Clidastes_. The results of Mr. Knight’s restorations of
many of the extinct animals brighten my pages, thanks to my friend
Professor Henry F. Osborn, so if I have failed in my pen pictures to
take my readers into the misty past, these brilliant restorations will
certainly have the desired effect.
I cannot hope in this short space to have given more than a passing
glance at the life of a fossil hunter. It has been one of joy to me; I
should not like to have missed making the discoveries I have made, and I
would willingly undergo the same hardships to accomplish the same
results. And if my story does anything to interest people in fossils, I
shall feel that I have not written in vain.
When I requested Professor William K. Gregory of Columbia University to
be the final reader of the manuscript of this book, “The Life of a
Fossil Hunter,” shall I ever forget his kind words? “I hope you will not
feel that you are under any personal obligations whatever, because this
slight service is simply laid upon me by the necessities of the case, i.
e., by the fact that your whole life and work have placed all
paleontologists under lasting obligations to you.” Surely “my cup
runneth over; I have a goodly heritage.” Greater than their obligations
to me, are mine to the men of science who have described, published,
but, above all, have prepared and exhibited the noble monuments of
creative genius which I have been so fortunate as to discover and make
known to the civilized world. My own body will crumble in dust, my soul
return to God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of
other days, will give joy and pleasure “to generations yet unborn.”
FINIS
INDEX
_Adocus_, 77
Amphibian, Long-horned, 253
Anderson, A. E., 58
Anseres, Fossil, 160
_Aphelops megalodus_, 123
_Archælurus debilis_, 189
_Aspidophyllum trilobatum_, 19
Bad Lands, Expedition to, 61–98
Bailey, Dr., 260
Baird, Letter from Spencer F., 20
Basin, John Day, 173, 190
Batrachians, Fossil, 161
Beds, Laramie, 272
Benton, Fort, 79, 97, 98
_Betulites westii_, 30
Bison, Giant Fossil, 267, 268
Blackbird, Fossil, 161
Bourne, W. O., 58
Broili, Dr. F., 112, 234, 253, 254, 255, 258
Bromfield, Corporal, 226, 227
Brontosaurus, 78
Brouse, A. W., 101, 121, 141
Button, Mr. Lee, 157, 168, 169
Camel, Fossil, 187, 188, 242
Carboniferous, Upper, 135
_Cardicephalus sternbergi_, 255
Chalk, Expedition to Kansas, 32–60
Further Work in Kansas, 99–119
_Clidastes_, 53, 135, 280
_tortor_, 44
_velox_, 51, 53
_westi_, 135
College, Vassar, 53
Condon, Prof., 160, 161
Coots, Fossil, 161
Cope, Prof. E. D., Characteristics of, 45, 69, 74, 75, 83, 84, 89, 90,
91, 92, 93, 95, 239, 242, 243
Expedition to Bad Lands with, 61–89
Horned Dinosaurs Discovered by, 87
Letter from, 33, 142
News of Death of, 241
Speech Given by, 45
Memory and Imagination of, 75, 76
Wit of, 98, 99
Cormorants, Fossil, 160
Coulée, Grand, 175, 204
County, Converse, 270
Gove, 34, 118
Logan, 35, 38, 50, 54, 57, 60
Coyote, 211
Creek, Beaver, 138
Bushy, 234
Butte, 50
Chapman, 101
Coffee, 245, 246, 252
Cottonwood, 273
Deer, 126
Dog, 68, 77, 79, 81, 88
Gray, 250, 253
Hackberry 34, 35, 38, 107, 135, 266
Hay, 60
Indian, 241
Pine, 170
Pony, 261
Prairie Dog, 126, 127
Sappa, 120, 121, 140
Cretaceous, Life of the, 54
Crinoid, Stemless, 266
Davis, Leander, 196, 198, 202, 203
Day, Bill, 173, 178
Dayville, 189
Desert, Expedition to the Oregon, 144–169
_Diceratherium nanum_, 189
_Dimetredon_, 217, 256
Dinosaur, 77, 273
Duck-billed, 275
Horned, 87, 88
Three-horned, 270
_Diplocaulus_, 227, 257
_copei_, 254, 255
_magnicornis_, 240, 253, 255
_Dissorophus_, 242
_Dolichorhynchus osborni_, 111
Duncan, Mr., 154, 156, 158
Eastman, Dr., 114
Elephant, Columbian, 268
_Elephas primigenius_, 160
_Elotherium humerosum_, 186, 187
_Enhydrocyon stenocephalus_, 189
_Eryops_, 217, 227, 256
_megacephalus_, 251
Ficus, 23
Flamingo, Fossil, 161
Flora, Tertiary, 172
Fossils, Formation of, 258–260
Method of Excavating, 41, 42, 88, 109, 110, 130
Galyean, Frank, 230, 231, 232
Gar-pike, 253
Gorge, Picture, 173
Grebes, Fossil, 160
Gregory, Prof. William K., 280
Group, Fort Pierre, 70, 135
Loup Fork, 120
Niobrara, 50, 122
Grouse, Fossil, 161
Gulls, Fossil, 160
Hamman, George, 207, 209
_Haploscapha grandis_, 108
Hatcher, Prof. J. B., 70, 123, 133, 270
Hayden, Dr., 78, 205
Henry, Major, 229
Hermann, Adam, 58, 278
Heron, Fossil, 161
_Hesperornis regalis_, 265, 266
Hill, Mr. Russell, 101, 141
Hill, Smoky, 109, 113
Holland, Dr. W. J., 115
Hollick, Dr. A., 21, 22, 26
Horse, Three-toed, 126, 188
Howard, General, 191, 196, 197
Hoxie, 267
Huff, Joe, 170, 177
_Ichthyornis_, 269
_Inoceramus_, 135
Isaac, J. C., 47, 48, 61, 65, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 93, 94, 98
Island, Cow, 79, 87, 89, 91, 98
Long, 132, 134
Klamath, Fort, 142, 146
Knight, Charles R., 279, 280
Knowlton, Dr. F. H., 24
_Labidosaurus_, 256, 257
_hamatus_, 253
Lacoe, R. D., 24
Lake, Fossil, 158
Silver, 148, 149, 154
Leaves, Formation of Fossil, 28, 29
Preparation of Fossil, 25, 26
Lesquereux, Dr., 19, 21, 22, 23, 24
Lizard, Fin-backed, 227, 234
Flying, 266
Loosely, George, 148, 152, 158
Loup Fork Beds, Discovery of the, 120–143
Lucas, Dr. F. A., 265
Lynx, Canadian, 211
_Lysorophus tricarinatus_, 258
Macbride, Letter from Prof. T. K., 27
Mammoth, Columbian, 260
Teeth of Columbian, 134
Skull of Hairy, 160
Marsh, Prof. O. C., 32, 77, 87, 129, 133, 173
Marsupials, 272
Martin, H. T., 112
Mascall, Mr., 178, 179, 190, 191, 193
Mastodon, 123, 125, 127
Jaws of, 124, 125
Matthew, W. D., 279
Menette, Major J. F., 222
Merriam, J. C., 165
Miocene, Upper, 131
_Monoclonius_, 87
_crassus_, 87
_sphenocerus_, 87
Mosasaur, 27, 50, 204
Mountains, Bear Paw, 97
Judith River, 85
Mudge, Prof. B. F., 32
Museum, American, 57, 78, 187, 188, 189, 234, 243, 250, 266, 278, 279
British, 51, 125, 267, 271, 273
Cambridge, 123
Carnegie, 53, 54, 59, 115, 117, 133
French, 266
Harvard, 137
Munich, 112, 234, 244, 262
National, 134, 265
Princeton, 133
Roemer, 51
Senckenberg, 118
Yale, 133
_Myledaphus bipartitus_, 78
_Mylodon_, 161
_Naosaurus_, 227, 234, 235, 236
Ness City, 268
Newberry, Dr. J. S., 21
_Oreodon_, 177, 189
Osborn, Prof. H. F., 51, 57, 112, 115, 243, 257, 271, 278, 279, 280
Osborn and Lambe, 77, 78
_Otocœlus_, 242
Overton, Mr., 128, 129
Owl, Fossil, Great Horned, 161
_Paratylopus sternbergi_, 188
_Pariotichus_, 257
Peccary, Fossil, 189
Permian, Expeditions in the Texas, 230–243
_Phœnicopterus copei_, 161
_Platecarpus_, 46, 51, 52, 53
_coryphæus_, 50, 204
_Pogonodon platycopis_, 202
_Portheus molossus_, 54, 57, 58
Collecting a Specimen of, 55, 56, 57
Description of, 59, 60
Prentice, Sidney, 53, 279
_Protophyllum sternbergi_, 18
_Protostega gigas_, 114, 115, 116, 117
_Pteranodon_, 266
_Pythonomorpha_, 44
Quarry, The Sternberg, 125, 126, 131
Theory of Presence of Fossil Animals in, 131, 132
Rattlesnake, 210
Raven, Fossil, 161
Rhinoceros, 123, 133, 134
Bones of, 127, 128, 138
Skull of, 189
River, Expedition to the John Day, 170–204
Loup Fork, 120
Soloman, 34, 121
Sprague, 149, 151
Rocks, Monument, 36, 46, 116
Russ, Will, 129
Salamander, Great, 217, 227, 251
Fossil, 240
Sandstone, Concretions of, 15
_Sassafras dissectum_, 19
Sassafras, Fossil Leaves of, 18
Seymour, 249
Shark, Cretaceous, 113
Shufeldt, Dr., 160, 161, 162
Sill, Fort, 220, 226
Sloth, Fossil, 161
Snow, Prof., 104
Springer, Mr. Frank, 117, 118
Sternberg, Charles H., Adventure on a Cliff, 182–184
Adventure with a Norther, 214
Buffalo Hunting, 6–9
Dangerous Ride, 96
Discovery of the Texas Permian, 230–233
Experience with a Cyclone, 121
Finding a Fossil Lake, 158
Narrow Escape from Death, 72, 73
Setting a Dislocation, 140, 141
Wild Ride through Bad Lands, 89–92
Writing “Pliocene Man,” 159
Sternberg, Charles M., 263
Sternberg, George, 109–111, 118, 171, 246, 252, 255, 256, 262, 273, 274
Sternberg, Levi, 272, 274
Swan, Fossil, 160
_Teleoceras fossiger_, 134
_Testudo orthopygia_, 122, 138, 269
Texas, Expedition to Permian of, 205–229
In the Red Beds of, 244–264
Tiger, Saber-toothed, 137, 202
Tortoise, Sea, 114
_Trachodon_, 77
_mirabilis_, 275–277
_Triceratops_, 270, 273
_Trilophodon campester_, 123, 124
_Trionyx_, 77
Turtle, Land, 121
Sea, 77
_Tylosaurus_, 51
Ram-nosed, 49
_Tyrannosaurus rex_, 277
_Uintacrinus_, 118, 119
_socialis_, 117, 266
University, California, 165
Harvard, 205
Iowa State, 50
Kansas State, 51, 111, 135, 112
Oregon State, 160
Yale, 77
Valley, Sican, 151, 153
_Varanosaurus acutirostris_, 254
Village, Deserted Indian, 163–165
Von Zittel, Dr. Carl, 113, 244
Letter from, 247, 248
Walla Walla, Fort, 170
Water, Alkali, 41
Desert, 211–213
West, Judge E. P., 30, 135
Whelan, Pat, 214
Whitaker, Governor, 160, 162
Wichita, Big, 209, 212, 227, 230
Williston, Dr. S. W., 49, 50, 53, 111, 112, 113, 144
Woodward, Dr. A. Smith, 266, 273
Wortman, Dr. J. L., 134, 171, 188, 279
Wright, Mr., 140, 218
_Zeuglodon_, 57
E. RAY LANKESTER’S EXTINCT ANIMALS
By Prof. E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S., Keeper of the Natural History
Department of the British Museum, Author of “The Advancement of Science”
and “A Treatise of Zoölogy.” With numerous illustrations. $1.75 net; by
mail, $1.93.
An interesting book by a high authority, based on a course of his
successful, popular lectures. His narrative is well unified and
developed, and his style so simple that children as well as older folk
may enjoy the work. The illustrations are unusually effective.
_N. Y. Sun_:—A charming book ... showing that the greatest learning
can be combined with the utmost simplicity of expression ... a book
of intense interest ... the pictures are skilfully arranged to
elucidate the text.
_N. Y. Globe_:—A great deal more lively than it sounds.... Huxley
himself could not have talked more instructively in such simple
language.
_N. Y. Tribune_:—Opens up a world of new interest, popular rather
than technical.
E. RAY LANKESTER’S THE KINGDOM OF MAN
“Nature’s Insurgent Son”; “The Advance of Science—1881–1906”; “Nature’s
Revenges—The Sleeping Sickness.” $1.40 net; by mail, $1.52.
A readable and pictorial survey, brief but nevertheless accurate, of the
recent progress in the many branches of science—all leading towards the
realization of man’s kingdom—the conquest and control of nature.
_H. I. Brock in a three-column notice in the New York Times Saturday
Review._—An impressive statement of human progress in knowledge and
power by a conservative scientist who believes man soon able to
eliminate disease ... exceedingly interesting ... it gathers into a
very small compass and presents sharply to the layman an immensely
impressive set of facts and ideas.
* * * * *
⁂ If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will
send, from time to time, information regarding their new books.
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
34 WEST 33d STREET NEW YORK
THE AMERICAN NATURE SERIES
In the hope of doing something toward furnishing a series where the
nature-lover can surely find a readable book of high authority, the
publishers of the American Science Series have begun the publication of
the American Nature Series. It is the intention that in its own way, the
new series shall stand on a par with its famous predecessor.
The primary object of the new series is to answer questions which the
contemplation of Nature is constantly arousing in the mind of the
unscientific intelligent person. But a collateral object will be to give
some intelligent notion of the “causes of things.”
While the coöperation of foreign scholars will not be declined, the
books will be under the guarantee of American experts, and generally
from the American point of view; and where material crowds space,
preference will be given to American facts over others of not more than
equal interest.
The series will be in six divisions:
I. NATURAL HISTORY
_This division will consist of two sections._
=Section A. A large popular Natural History= in several volumes, with
the topics treated in due proportion, by authors of unquestioned
authority. 8vo. 7½ × 10¼ in.
_The books so far publisht in this section are_:
=FISHES=, by DAVID STARR JORDAN, President of the Leland Stanford
Junior University. $6.00 net; carriage extra.
=AMERICAN INSECTS=, by VERNON L. KELLOGG, Professor in the Leland
Stanford Junior University. $5.00 net; carriage extra.
_Arranged for are_:
=SEEDLESS PLANTS=, by GEORGE T. MOORE, Head of Department of Botany,
Marine Biological Laboratory, assisted by other specialists.
=WILD MAMMALS OF NORTH AMERICA=, by C. HART MERRIAM, Chief of the
United States Biological Survey.
=BIRDS OF THE WORLD.= A popular account by FRANK H. KNOWLTON, M.S.,
Ph.D., Member American Ornithologists Union, President Biological
Society of Washington, etc., etc. with Chapter on Anatomy of Birds
by FREDERIC A. LUCAS, Chief Curator Brooklyn Museum of Arts and
Sciences, and edited by ROBERT RIDGWAY, Curator of Birds, U. S.
National Museum.
=REPTILES AND BATRACHIANS=, by LEONHARD STEINEGER, Curator of
Reptiles, U. S. National Museum.
=Section B. A Shorter Natural History=, mainly by the Authors of Section
A, preserving its popular character, its proportional treatment, and its
authority so far as that can be preserved without its fullness. Size not
yet determined.
II. CLASSIFICATION OF NATURE
=1. Library Series=, very full descriptions. 8vo. 7½ × 10¼ in.
_Already publisht_:
=NORTH AMERICAN TREES=, by N. L. BRITTON, Director of the New York
Botanical Garden. $7.00 net; carriage extra.
=FERNS=, by CAMPBELL E. WATERS, of Johns Hopkins University 8vo, pp.
xi + 362. $3.00 net; by mail, $3.30.
=2. Pocket Series, Identification Books=—“How to Know,” brief and in
portable shape.
III. FUNCTIONS OF NATURE
These books will treat of the relation of facts to causes and effects—of
heredity and the relations of organism to environment. 8vo. 6⅝ × 8⅞ in.
_Already publisht_:
=THE BIRD: ITS FORM AND FUNCTION=, by C. W. BEEBE, Curator of Birds
in the New York Zoological Park. 8vo, 496 pp. $3.50 net; by mail,
$3.80.
_Arranged for_:
=THE INSECT: ITS FORM AND FUNCTION=, by VERNON L. KELLOGG, Professor
in the Leland Stanford Junior University.
=THE FISH: ITS FORM AND FUNCTION=, by H. M. SMITH, of the U. S.
Bureau of Fisheries.
IV. WORKING WITH NATURE
How to propagate, develop, care for and depict the plants and animals.
The volumes in this group cover such a range of subjects that it is
impracticable to make them of uniform size.
_Already publisht_:
=NATURE AND HEALTH=, by EDWARD CURTIS, Professor Emeritus in the
College of Physicians and Surgeons. 12mo. $1.95 net; by mail,
$1.37.
=THE FRESHWATER AQUARIUM AND ITS INHABITANTS.= A Guide for the
Amateur Aquarist, by OTTO EGGELING and FREDERICK EHRENBERG. Large
12mo. $9.00 net; by mail, $2.19.
=THE LIFE OF A FOSSIL HUNTER=, by CHARLES H. STERNBERG.
_Arranged for_:
=PHOTOGRAPHING NATURE=, by E. R. SANBORN, Photographer of the New
York Zoological Park.
=THE SHELLFISH INDUSTRIES=, by JAMES L. KELLOGG, Professor in
Williams College.
=CHEMISTRY OF DAILY LIFE=, by HENRY P. TALBOT, Professor of
Chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
=DOMESTIC ANIMALS=, by WILLIAM H. BREWER, Professor Emeritus in Yale
University.
=THE CARE OF TREES IN LAWN, STREET AND PARK=, by B. E. FERNOW,
Professor of Forestry, University of Toronto.
V. DIVERSIONS FROM NATURE
This division will include a wide range of writings not rigidly
systematic or formal, but written only by authorities of standing. Large
12mo. 5¼ × 8⅛ in.
_Already publisht_:
=INSECT STORIES=, by VERNON L. KELLOGG. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.69
=FISH STORIES=, by CHARLES F. HOLDER and DAVID STARR JORDAN.
_Arranged for_:
=HORSE TALK=, by WILLIAM H. BREWER.
=BIRD NOTES=, by C. W. BEEBE.
VI. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
A Series of volumes by President JORDAN, of Stanford University, and
Professors BROOKS of Johns Hopkins, LULL of Yale, THOMSON of Aberdeen,
PASIBRAM of Austria, ZUR STRASSEN of Germany, and others. Edited by
Professor KELLOGG of Leland Stanford, 12mo. 5⅛ × 7½ in.
* * * * *
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, NEW YORK
January, ’09.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Life of a Fossil Hunter" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.